For his feature debut, twenty-four-year-old Louis Malle brought together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis. Taking place over the course of one restless Paris night, Malle’s richly atmospheric crime thriller stars Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers whose plan to murder her husband (his boss) goes awry, setting off a chain of events that seals their fate. A career touchstone for its director and female star, Elevator to the Gallows is a great noir and an astonishing beginning to Malle’s eclectic body of work, and it established Moreau as one of the most captivating actors ever to grace the screen.
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Hosted by Author and Filmmaker Robert Mailer Anderson
6 PM: “Happy Hour Gramophone Concert” by DJ GrampaPhone (Robert Mailer Anderson himself) & Co Hosted by Ethan Iverson spinning 78 shellacs on his 1906 gramophone including selected tracks from Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Duke Ellington, Pete Johnson, Champion Jack Dupree, Nat King Cole, Earl Hines, and more!
7 PM: Introduction by Ethan Iverson & A Screening of Elevator to the Gallows
ETHAN IVERSON: Pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson was a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” During his 17-year tenure, TBP performed in venues as diverse as the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, and Bonnaroo; collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group; and created a faithful arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction.
Since leaving TBP, Iverson has kept busy. 2017: Co-curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University and premiered the evening-length Pepperland with the Mark Morris Dance Group. 2018: premiered an original piano concerto with the American Composers Orchestra and released a duo album of new compositions with Mark Turner on ECM. 2019: Common Practice with Tom Harrell (ECM), standards tracked live at the Village Vanguard. 2021: Bud Powell in the 21st Century, a vigorous reconsideration of the bebop master, is featured on the March cover of DownBeat. 2022: The current release is Every Note is True on Blue Note records, an album of original work in trio with Larry Grenadier and Jack DeJohnette.
Iverson also has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with elder statesmen like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter or collaborates with noted classical musicians like Miranda Cuckson and Mark Padmore. For almost 20 years, Iverson’s website Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis. Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition—the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.” Iverson has also published articles about music in the New Yorker, NPR, The Nation, and JazzTimes. Iverson resides in Park Slope with his wife Sarah Deming.
ROBERT MAILER ANDERSON: Anderson is a native San Franciscan, 9th generation Californian, writer, producer, filmmaker (Windows on The World, Pig Hunt) activist, author of the bestselling novel Boonville, and nominated for 3 Grammys as a music producer. His most recent work is the graphic novel My Fairy Godfather (Fantagraphics) - dedicated to The Castro Theater. He is also known as "DJ GrampaPhone” - spinning 78 records on his 120-year-old gramophone.