Royce to host tribute for avant-garde artist

  UCLA Performing Arts The Harry Smith Project will include
an all-star lineup of musicians including Elvis
Costello at Royce Hall.

By Kelsey McConnell
Daily Bruin Contributor

His hair looked as if it was attempting to flee his head and his
clothes would never know an iron, but the mind under the wild
appearance of the late Harry Smith was responsible for inspiring a
generation of writers, artists and musicians.

UCLA Performing Arts will present “Hal Willner’s
Harry Smith Project” tonight and tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in
Royce Hall. The show will feature such artists as Beck and Elvis
Costello as they celebrate the work of Harry Smith.

Show organizers promise this event will be nothing less than
transcendent.

“The London and New York shows were already two fairly
legendary events and I basically wanted to create another,”
said UCLA Performing Arts Director David Sefton. “I want it
to be one of those things people lie about having been at. I want
six or seven thousand people to claim to have been at Royce Hall
over those two nights.”

Smith was at the center of the American avant-garde movement
during the mid-twentieth century. He was driven to look for
connections between various, sometimes seemingly incongruous,
mediums.

For example, he collected Ukrainian Easter eggs and spoons
shaped like ducks. He donated the largest paper airplane collection
in the world to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air
Space Museum. He wanted others to realize that the fibers of
American art and culture wove the far-flung arms of society into
some sort of unified pattern.

Smith’s expertise expanded far beyond paper airplanes,
however. He cultivated the reputation as one of the leading
American experimental filmmakers. His films ranged from stop-motion
collages to pieces in which Smith painted directly on the film.

The music world best remembers Smith for his “Anthology of
American Folk Music” issued by Folkways in 1952. Comprised of
84 recordings made between 1927 and 1932, the anthology chronicles
the American tradition of folk music. It has been touted as the
seminal inspiration for the folk music revival of the 1950s and
’60s and credited with shaping such musical legends as Bob
Dylan and Jerry Garcia.

“He was a real visionary,” Sefton said. “It
wasn’t fashionable to be focusing on the historical stuff in
that way. He was decades ahead of his time.”

How did Harry Smith go from obscure left-field thinker to the
subject of a two night musical spree?

Sefton explained that the concept was born while he was working
with musician Nick Cave on the Meltdown Festival in London in
1999.

“It was on Nick Cave’s wish list to talk to Hal
Willner,” Sefton said. “Willner’s just one of
those people whose always done really interesting stuff.”

When Sefton met with eclectic music producer Willner, Willner
brought up the Harry Smith angle.

“Hal was a big fan of the anthology,” Sefton said.
“He wanted to do something with contemporary artists drawing
in all the things that Smith did.”

“Through knowing Harry I got to see all these
things,” Willner said in a phone interview from New York.
“The things he collected and how they are interpreted under
the theory that there was a connection between these things. I
thought, I’d like to have a go at this in a montage-y
way.”

The first Smith tribute show Willner did in London was a
hit.

“The London show was epic ““ mad, insane,”
Sefton said. “It was completely around the twist.”

The concert was reprised four months later in a show in New York
City. Sefton took the success of that show as a sign that it was
something L.A. needed.

“Part of my reason for picking this event was because
it’s not generally the kind of thing Royce Hall would have
been known for, but my instincts tell me it’s something the
UCLA community wants in there,” he said.

The UCLA show is just one part of the current Harry Smith
Tribute extravaganza. The Getty Research Institute held a two day
symposium entitled “Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the
American Vernacular.”

“I’d had in mind to do something with Harry
Smith,” said Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research
Institute, in a phone interview from New Orleans.

“He was eccentric in a strictly descriptive sense,”
Crow continued. “He just didn’t do what anyone else
did. He presented knowledge in a way that didn’t conform to
any other scholarly method and this symposium has been an
astonishing thing to be able to do.”

The April 20 and 21 symposium featured speakers from the Harry
Smith Archives and universities from around the nation,
Smith’s films and samples of the anthology.

Royce Hall audiences should expect something a little less
structured.

“Sometimes the musicians are introduced, sometimes
not,” Willner said.

Regardless of structure, the content of the two nights has
promise.

“Of all the events ““ New York and London ““
this is the best list of performers,” Sefton said.
“There’s actually one or two names we can’t
announce.”

The list of performers not only includes Beck and Costello, but
also Marianne Faithfull, Van Dyke Parks and the men once known as
Spinal Tap.

“It’s a completely different set of characters from
Spinal Tap, it’s their folk band,” Sefton said.

The London show impressed audiences for five hours and Sefton is
sure this kind of energy will drive the performance at Royce Hall
as well.

“People should be warned, this is not a show you’ll
be going out to dinner after ““ breakfast possibly,”
Sefton said.

With the contagious zeal of show organizers as motivation and
the work and memory of Smith as a guide, “Hal Willner’s
Harry Smith Project” should be as musically exciting as it is
being billed.

MUSIC: The Harry Smith Project shows at Royce
Hall Wednesday, April 25 and Thursday, April 26 at 8 p.m. For
ticketing information call the Central Ticket Office at (310)
825-2101.