Hot Club / Silent Surrealism

Over the course of the last decade or so, there's been a literal explosion of bands playing acoustic jazz in the style of Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grapelli and their Quintet of the Hot Club of France from the 1930s....One of the best of the lot is a pioneering group of the new era, the Hot Club of San Francisco, led by guitarist Paul "Pazzo" Mehling. The fivesome...accompany a set of silent films in a program called "Silent Surrealism."

...I asked Mehling what that meant.

"I have this friend who put together the San Francisco Silent Film Festival," he said, "and I was always hitting on him to be a part of the festival because they were always playing music to go with the films. Long story short, he said, 'Here's a bunch of films. Look at them and see if you can pick a short one and write some music for it.'

"So I took that to our booking agent, and he said 'Why don't you put together four films for a show, a nice evening of film.' So I did, and the rest is history. What we've done is take two films by an unknown who was a contemporary of Charlie Chaplin, but nobody's ever heard of him. His name is Charlie Bowers. We call his films surrealism, not because it's like from the French surrealistic school, but because it's like taking drugs without having to take drugs. It's great family entertainment that way! None of his films exist in America; eleven copies were found in Europe in the possession of gypsies who took them around from town to town and showed 'em, probably for money. So that's the tie-in with gypsy jazz.

"Then we have a spooky, scary film of 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' Edgar Allen Poe, that's kind of fun. And the last one is a bittersweet film about a poor little boy who gets an opportunity to go on a field trip to the big city. People watch it and they're not sure at the end how they're supposed to feel about it---was that happy or sad?"

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