John Lurie | |
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Born | Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. | December 14, 1952
Occupations |
|
Years active | 1978–present |
Known for | The Lounge Lizards |
Television | Painting with John , Fishing with John , Oz |
Relatives | Evan Lurie (brother) |
Website | www |
John Lurie (born December 14, 1952) is an American musician, painter, actor, director, and producer. He co-founded the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble; has acted in 19 films, including Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law ; has composed and performed music for 20 television and film works; and he produced, directed, and starred in the Fishing with John television series. In 1996 his soundtrack for Get Shorty was nominated for a Grammy Award, and his album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits has been praised by critics and fellow musicians. [1]
Since 2000, he has suffered from symptoms attributed to chronic Lyme disease and has focused his attention on painting. [2] His art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. His primitivist painting Bear Surprise became an internet meme in Russia in 2006. His television series, Painting with John , debuted on HBO in January 2021 and ran for three seasons before being cancelled. [3] [4] Lurie's 1980s NYC memoir, The History of Bones, was published by Penguin Random House in August 2021. [5]
Lurie was born in Minneapolis and raised with his brother Evan and sister Liz in New Orleans, Louisiana and Worcester, Massachusetts. [6] [7] His mother, an artist, was Welsh, and his father was half Russian Jewish and half Sicilian. [8] [9]
In high school, he played basketball and harmonica and jammed with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Canned Heat in 1968. [6] He briefly played the harmonica in a band from Boston, but soon switched to the guitar and eventually the saxophone. [10]
After high school, he hitchhiked across the United States to Berkeley, California. He moved to New York City in 1974, then briefly visited London, where he performed his first saxophone solo at the Acme Gallery. [6]
In 1978 John formed the Lounge Lizards with his brother Evan Lurie on piano; they were the only constant members in the band through numerous lineup changes.
Robert Palmer of The New York Times described the band as "staking out new territory west of Mingus, east of Bernard Herrman." While originally a somewhat satirical "fake jazz" combo spawned by the noisy No Wave music scene, the Lounge Lizards gradually became a showcase for Lurie's increasingly sophisticated compositions. The band had five to eight members. Musicians included, at different times, guitarists Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, David Tronzo, Michele Navazio and Danny Blumenthal; cellist Jane Scarpantoni; vibraphonist Bryan Carrott; keyboardist John Medeski; drummers Anton Fier, Grant Calvin Weston and Dougie Bowne; percussionists Billy Martin, E.J. Rodriguez and Ben Perowsky; bassists Erik Sanko, Tony Scherr, Oren Bloedow and Tony Garnier; trumpeter Steven Bernstein; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes and saxophonists Roy Nathanson and Michael Blake. They made music for 20 years.
In 1999 Lurie released the album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits, a posthumous collection of the work of an African-Jewish musician named Marvin Pontiac, a fictional character Lurie created. It includes a biographical profile describing the troubled genius's hard life, and the cover shows a photograph purported to be one of the few ever taken of him. [11] Lurie wrote the music and performed with John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, Marc Ribot, and Tony Scherr. The album received praise from David Bowie, Angelique Kidjo, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen and others. On choosing to create a character to whom the album would be fictionally credited, Lurie said in a 2008 interview, "For a long time, I was threatening to do a vocal record. But the idea of me putting out a record where I sang seemed ostentatious or pretentious. Like the music of Telly Savalas . . . I don't sing very well, I was shy about it. As a character, it made it easier." [11]
Elmore Leonard's 2002 novel Tishomingo Blues has detailed descriptions of Marvin Pontiac's biography and music, crediting him with influencing Iggy Pop and David Bowie. [12]
In 2017, John Lurie released his first music album in 17 years, Marvin Pontiac: The Asylum Tapes. [13]
Parallel to the final version of the Lounge Lizards in the early 1990s, Lurie formed a smaller group, the John Lurie National Orchestra. Lurie played alto and soprano saxes, Grant Calvin Weston played drums, and Billy Martin performed on congas, timbales, kalimba, and other small percussion. Unlike the tightly-arranged music of the Lounge Lizards, the Orchestra's music was heavily improvised and compositions were credited to all three musicians.
They released the album Men With Sticks (Crammed Discs 1993) and recorded music for the Fishing With John TV series. In February 2014 the Orchestra released The Invention of Animals, a collection of out-of-print studio tracks and unreleased live recordings from the '90s. Columnist Mel Minter wrote:
This new release may require a reassessment of Lurie the saxophonist because the playing is engagingly fluid, inventive, and visceral—and well worth revisiting. . . . The emotional immediacy of Lurie's playing – and that of his partners – makes for riveting stuff. Think of his sax not so much as a musical instrument, but instead, as a window with a clear view of his soul. [14] [15]
Jeff Jackson of Jazziz added, "The resulting music is delicate, primal and utterly gorgeous." [16]
In 1993 Lurie composed the theme to Late Night with Conan O'Brien with Howard Shore. The theme was also used when O'Brien hosted on The Tonight Show. Lurie formed his own record label in 1998, Strange & Beautiful Music, and released the Lounge Lizards album Queen of All Ears and a Fishing with John soundtrack.
Lurie has written scores for over 20 movies, including Stranger than Paradise , Down by Law , Mystery Train , Clay Pigeons , Animal Factory , and Get Shorty , for which he received a Grammy Award nomination. [17]
In the 1980s, Lurie starred in the Jim Jarmusch films Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law , and made cameos in the films Permanent Vacation and Downtown 81 . He went on to act in other notable films including Paris, Texas , Wild at Heart and The Last Temptation of Christ . From 2001 to 2003 he starred in the HBO prison series Oz as inmate Greg Penders. [18]
Lurie wrote, directed and starred in the TV series Fishing with John in 1991 and 1992, which featured guests Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Jim Jarmusch, and Dennis Hopper. It aired on IFC and Bravo. It has since become a cult classic [19] and was released on DVD by Criterion.
In January 2021 Lurie's series Painting with John aired on HBO. In June 2021 he announced that a second season of the show was planned and for the first time in 22 years, he was rehearsing music for it. [20] The third season of Painting with John, consisting of six episodes, first aired on June 2, 2023. Lurie's friend and fellow musician Flea appears in one of the episodes. [21]
Lurie has been painting since the 1970s. [22] Most of his early works are in watercolor and pencil, but in the 2000s he began working in oil. In 2011, he said of his art, "My paintings are a logical development from the ones that were taped to the refrigerator 50 years ago." [23]
His work has been exhibited since July 2003, when two pieces were shown at the Nolan/Eckman Gallery in New York City. [24] He had his first solo gallery exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery in May and June 2004 and has subsequently been exhibited at Galerie Daniel Blau in Munich, Galerie Lelong in Zürich, the Galerie Gabriel Rolt in Amsterdam, the Basel International Art Fair at Roebling Hall and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago, the Mudam Luxembourg, the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Gallery Brown in Los Angeles, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. [25] [22] [24] The Museum of Modern Art has acquired some of his work for their permanent collection. [26]
Lurie has released two art books. Learn To Draw, a compilation of black and white drawings, was published by Walther Konig in June 2006. A Fine Example of Art includes over 80 reproductions of his work and was published by powerHouse Books in 2008.
Lurie's watercolor painting Bear Surprise was enormously popular on numerous Russian websites in an Internet meme known as Preved. [27]
Lurie has never married. He detailed many of his romantic relationships between the 1970s and 1990s in his 2021 memoir The History of Bones. In August 2010, Lurie was reported to be dating a woman named Jill Goodwin (b. 1979). [28]
Lurie became ill with neurological symptoms in 1994, [17] and has experienced debilitating ill health since 2000. [17] At one point he was told he had a year to live. [10] During this time, he wrote in a mad dash until his brain fog got so severe that he had to stop writing. [29]
He stated in a 2006 interview that he has "Advanced Lyme", [6] referring to chronic Lyme disease. This is a controversial medical diagnosis, generally rejected by medical professionals, used to describe "a broad array of illnesses or symptom complexes for which there is no reproducible or convincing scientific evidence of any relationship to Borrelia burgdorferi infection." [30] [31] He has stated that his diagnosis was received from "eight different purveyors of contemporary medicine" after years of disagreement among his physicians. [32] Lurie's illness prevents him from acting or performing music, so he spends his time painting. [6] [33]
In August 2010, Tad Friend wrote a piece in The New Yorker about Lurie disappearing from New York to avoid a man named John Perry, who Friend said was stalking Lurie. [28] In the online literary magazine The Rumpus, Rick Moody noted that Friend's profile in The New Yorker, nominally about Lurie and his art, was two-thirds to three-quarters about Perry, including a full page photo of Perry standing in front of one of his own paintings. Moody described Perry as a deceitful stalker capable of violence and was also critical of Friend's "ungenerous" characterization of Lurie's illness as a "mysterious disease." [32]
In May 2011 Perry undertook a public hunger strike to protest The New Yorker characterizing him as a stalker. Commenting about the protest, Lurie said, "He's conducting a hunger strike a half block from my house to prove he's not a stalker." [34] Lurie described the article as "wildly inaccurate," noting that its publication did not resolve anything and that "the situation continues." [17]
Editor David Remnick said the piece in his magazine was "thoroughly reported and fact-checked." [34] But in a letter to The New Yorker in August 2012, several interviewees claimed their words had been "twisted, misquoted, or ignored," and that "the man presented in the article [Lurie] is not the man that we know." [35] In a February 2014 interview, Lurie told the Los Angeles Times, "What one would hope is that the beauty in the music and in the paintings can somehow transcend and invalidate the kind of sickness that led to the article being written as it was and the kind of irresponsibility that allowed it to be published." [36]
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1978 | Rome '78 | Unknown | |
1979 | Men in Orbit | Astronaut | Also writer, director |
1980 | Underground U.S.A. | Jack Smith | |
The Offenders | The Lizard | ||
Permanent Vacation | Sax player | Also composer | |
1981 | Downtown 81 | Himself | |
Subway Riders | The Saxophonist | Also composer | |
1983 | Variety | — | Composer |
1984 | Stranger Than Paradise | Willie | Also composer |
Paris, Texas | Slater | ||
1985 | Desperately Seeking Susan | Neighbor Saxophonist | |
1986 | Down by Law | Jack | Also composer |
1988 | The Last Temptation of Christ | James | |
Il piccolo diavolo | Cusatelli | English title: The Little Devil | |
1989 | Mystery Train | — | Composer |
1990 | Wild at Heart | Sparky | |
1991 | Fishing with John | Himself | Also creator, director, composer |
Keep It for Yourself | — | Short film; composer | |
1992 | John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards Live in Berlin 1991 | Himself | Documentary |
1993 | Late Night with Conan O'Brien | — | Composed title theme |
1995 | Get Shorty | — | Composer |
Blue in the Face | — | Composer | |
1996 | Just Your Luck | Coker | |
Manny & Lo | — | Composer | |
1997 | Excess Baggage | — | Composer |
1998 | New Rose Hotel | Distinguished Man | |
Lulu on the Bridge | — | Composer | |
Clay Pigeons | — | Composer | |
2000 | Sleepwalk | Frank | |
Animal Factory | — | Composer | |
2001 | SpongeBob SquarePants | Himself | Archival footage from Fishing With John (Episode: "Hooky") |
2001–03 | Oz | Greg Penders | 12 episodes |
2004 | Tortured by Joy | Narrator | Short film |
2005 | Face Addict | — | Composer |
2010–11 | Mobsters | Narrator | |
2021-2023 | Painting with John | Himself | Also creator, director |
as John Lurie National Orchestra
as Marvin Pontiac
Albums
Other soundtrack releases
Studio albums
Live albums
The Lounge Lizards were an eclectic No Wave musical group founded by saxophonist John Lurie and his brother, pianist Evan Lurie, in 1978. Initially known for their ironic, tongue-in-cheek take on jazz, The Lounge Lizards eventually became a showcase for John Lurie's sophisticated compositions straddling jazz and many other genres. They were active until about 1998 with the Lurie brothers as the only constant members, though many leading New York City based musicians were members of the group.
Downtown 81 is a 2000 American film that was shot in 1980-1981. The film was directed by Edo Bertoglio and written and produced by Glenn O'Brien and Patrick Montgomery, with post-production in 1999-2000 by Glenn O'Brien and Maripol. It is a rare real-life snapshot of an ultra-hip subculture of post-punk era Manhattan. Starring renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and featuring such East Village artists as James Chance, Amos Poe, Walter Steding, Tav Falco and Elliott Murphy, the film is a bizarre elliptical urban fairy tale. In 1999, Michael Zilkha, founder of ZE Records, became the film's executive producer.
The Jazz Passengers are an American jazz group founded in 1987 by saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes. Alongside musicians like John Zorn, Don Byron, and John Lurie, they are widely regarded as pioneering voices in the 1980s East Village jazz scene that centered around clubs like The Knitting Factory.
Billy Martin is an American jazz drummer, best known as a member of jazz-funk trio Medeski Martin & Wood.
Fishing with John is a 1991 television series conceived, directed by and starring actor and musician John Lurie, which earned a cult following. On the surface, the series resembles a standard travel or fishing show: in each episode, Lurie takes a famous guest on a fishing expedition. Since Lurie has no expert knowledge of fishing, the interest is in the interaction between Lurie and his guests, all of whom are his friends. Nothing particularly unusual actually happens, but the show is edited and narrated in a way to suggest that Lurie and his guest are involved in dramatic and even supernatural adventures.
Eszter Balint is a Hungarian-American singer, songwriter, violinist, and actress. She made her film debut in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984). She went on to received a Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead nomination for Bail Jumper (1990). She also acted in American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), Shadows and Fog (1991), Trees Lounge (1996), Downtown 81 (2000), and The Dead Don't Die (2019). She has a recurring role as Amia in the third season of Louis C.K.'s FX series Louie in 2014.
Tony Scherr is an American jazz and folk rock bassist, guitarist, singer-songwriter, and record producer.
Evan Lurie is an American composer and musician. Playing piano and occasionally organ, Evan was a founding member of the band the Lounge Lizards, along with his saxophonist brother John Lurie.
Peter Zummo is an American composer and trombonist. He has been described as "an important exponent of the American contemporary classical tradition." He has called his own work "minimalism plus a whole lot more."
Ben Perowsky is an American drummer, percussionist, composer, and music producer. He is the drummer on stage in the 8 TONY award winning Broadway musical Hadestown. Perowsky leads the Ben Perowsky Trio, Moodswing Orchestra and Upstream Trio with Chris Speed and John Medeski. He is a founding member of the electric jazz group Lost Tribe. A prolific sideman, Perowsky has performed with Roy Ayers, John Scofield, The Lounge Lizards, Joan As Police Woman, Elysian Fields, Darryl Jenifer, Uri Caine, Dave Douglas, Mike Stern, Bob Berg, Walter Becker, Steven Bernstein., and John Zorn.
Erik Sanko is an American bass player who has played in The Lounge Lizards,Skeleton Key and currently active in Knife Thrower and SQURL.
David Tronzo is an American guitarist, best known for his innovation of pairing the techniques of electric slide guitar with the genres of bebop, modern jazz, rock, downtown music, and experimental music. He has recorded with former David Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels, Wayne Horvitz, David Sanborn, and The Lounge Lizards.
The Lounge Lizards is the first album by the Lounge Lizards. It features hectic instrumental jazz. The songs are mostly composed by band leader and saxophone player John Lurie. The album artwork was designed by the English graphic designer Peter Saville.
Voice of Chunk is a 1988 album by jazz band the Lounge Lizards.
No Pain for Cakes is an album by the American jazz band the Lounge Lizards, released in 1987. John Lurie sang on the album.
Patrick “Pat” Dillett is a 4 x Grammy winning New York based record producer, mixer & sound engineer. He is known for his working relationships with David Byrne, Donald Fagen,Nile Rodgers, and Thomas Bartlett a/k/a Doveman. He has worked with notable artists including They Might Be Giants, Sufjan Stevens, Rhye, Angelique Kidjo,Glen Hansard, Chris Thile, Laurie Anderson, Marisa Monte, St. Vincent, Caetano Veloso and the National, as well as pop and R&B singers Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey.
Michael Blake is a Canadian saxophonist, composer and arranger. Blake is based in New York City where he has led a robust career leading his own bands. As a sideman Michael has performed with Charlie Hunter, The Lounge Lizards, Steven Bernstein, Ben Allison and Ray LaMontagne. The New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff wrote,"Mr. Blake, on tenor especially, is an endlessly engaging improviser, and an inquisitive one".
Painting with John is an American unscripted television series created by musician, painter, and actor John Lurie. Each episode features Lurie painting watercolors and reflecting on life, music, and art. A six-episode first season premiered on HBO and its streaming subsidiary HBO Max on January 22, 2021. In August 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which premiered on February 18, 2022. The third season of the series began airing on June 2, 2023. The title alludes to Lurie's earlier show, Fishing with John, from 1991. On August 16, 2023, it was announced the series was canceled.
Queen of All Ears is an album by the American band the Lounge Lizards, released in 1998. It was the band's final album.
Grant Calvin Weston is a drummer best known for his association with Ornette Coleman's band Prime Time.