Honolulu Weekly

This month’s installment of Kailua town’s Second Sunday art walk (like Chinatown’s First Friday) includes a special screening of local filmmaker Robert Pennybacker’s film on the relationship between jazz and art.

Pennybacker (pictured below) says his film, Jazz & The Creative Act was inspired by Bill Evans’ liner notes for the Miles Davis classic album Kind of Blue. In the notes Evans compares jazz improvisation to traditional Japanese brush drawing.

With that in mind, Pennybacker set in motion the making of a film that would express the Evans analogy. He wanted ‘to show a jazz group in the act of creating while inter-cutting this with a painter creating in the same manner would illustrate, in a visceral way, the common thread between jazz and other forms of improvisational creation,’ says Pennybacker.

The end product is a film that brings together the Honolulu Jazz Quartet, painter Lauren Okano and dancer and choreographer Pam Sandridge. Okano and Sandridge, in separate frames, each practice their craft–spontaneously–to the quartet’s recording of its original composition ‘Heater’s On.’ Pennybacker asked film editor Daniel Bernardoni to tie it all together.

‘What resulted is, I feel, a unique collaboration between musicians, a painter, a dancer, an editor and a director that stands as a living testament to the power of spontaneous creation,’ says Pennybacker.

The film will be part of the Balcony Gallery’s exhibition opening of recent works by artists Sabra Feldstein, Lauren Okano, Deborah Pacheco, Adrienne Pao and Debbie Young.

The film will also be screened as part of a Pam Sandridge dance/fashion event at CafÈ Sistina on July 29.

Balcony Gallery, 442-A Uluniu St. (Kailua), Sun. 7/9, 2-5pm, free