Trio X -The Train and the River

Description

Personnel: Joe McPhee: trumpet, pocket trumpet, valve trombone, alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet; Dominic Duval: bass; Jay Rosen: drums. Directed by Dmitrij Veller. Principal cameraman: Evgeny Levin; cameras: Stanislav Savickis, Rimvydas Galvydis. Edited by Evgeny Levin. Recorded and mixed by Nepriklausomi Garso Rezisieriai. Produced by Valerij Anosov & Dmitrij Veller. Too few musicians in the past have been able to tell their own personal stories. It has been up to historians and critics to do the work of “educating” (sometimes inaccurately) the public about the music that is seemingly less than accessible, but for the musician the most real. Fortunately, present-day technology affords musicians the opportunity to widely disseminate their own self-portraits. And The Train & The River, filmed in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2006, provides such a portrait, documenting in memorable detail a trio of musicians who continued their pursuit after going unnoticed at the Vision Festival in New York years ago. The trio? Trio X, comprised of multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen. Borrowing its title from a Jimmy Giuffre piece of the same name, this visual and aural record of Trio X corresponds more to a foreign film than to a typical jazz musician documentary. The film is a pastiche of highly saturated or digitally overlaid colors within crystalline or unfocused river-scapes and train-scapes juxtaposed with muted wintry scenes of the members of the trio walking and talking together in open city- spaces. Interwoven into the mix are separate interviews of each of the trio members, but the questions are always unheard.