WHO’S CRAZY?

Today's freeload is the Ornette Coleman's soundtrack to the film, "WHO’S CRAZY?".

"WHO’S CRAZY?" was Thomas White’s first and only feature, that debuted at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, and then fell into obscurity.  It was filmed in rural Belgium and features members of the New York-based Living Theatre troupe, but sadly without its founders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, whom I would have loved to have seen in this film.

The film follows a group of insane asylum inmates who are being transported by bus. When the bus breaks down in a lonely place in the wintry countryside, an inmate runs for it. When two guards hustle to recapture him, the rest of the patients all escape and elude the guards. Making their way to a desolate and abandoned brick farmhouse, the uniformed patients find a way in, take shelter, and construct, in isolation, an antic yet earnest domesticity that summons the Living Theatre troupe’s wide and wild range of improvisational skills. The film is more than worth searching out.

 The Soundtrack

Ornette playing alto saxophone, trumpet and violin, along with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett, recorded the music in a Paris studio in one take while watching the film projected on a wall. This is the same trio as heard on "Town Hall, 1962" and “At the Golden Circle".

The soundtrack also features a young Marianne Faithfull singing what are probably her most experimental riffs – written for her especially by Ornette – as she asks, “Is God man? Is man God?” in an original track titled “Sadness”, which, unfortunately, was not included on Ornette's release. But you can hear it below.

 

 

To "get your hands on" this freeload, tell us what was the craziest thing you've ever done.