A CINEMA GUILD RELEASE A film by Jake Meginsky

91 MIN / 2018 / USA / in English Official Site: www.fullmantis.com

Booking Contact: Press Contact:

Gabriel Chicoine/George Myers Sylvia Savadjian [email protected] [email protected]

SYNOPSIS

MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is a portrait of renowned percussionist , exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity.

Graves has performed internationally since 1964, both as a soloist and in ensembles with such legends as , and . He is widely considered to be a founding pioneer of avant-garde , and he remains one of the most influential living figures in the evolution of the form.

The film draws the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement - all of this just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects for South Jamaica, .

Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle and survival, ruminates on the essence of 'swing,' activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan where he performs at a school for children with autism, igniting the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy.

Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances from around the globe, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’ music itself.

OFFICIAL FILM FESTIVAL SELECTION Sarasota Film Festival, Winner - Independent Vision Jury Prize SXSW Film Festival International Film Festival Art of the Real, Film Society Of Lincoln Center Sheffield Doc Fest CPH:DOX INDIELISBOA DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT FROM JAKE MEGINSKY

The seeds of Milford Graves Full Mantis were planted nearly 15 years ago.

In 2004, I ended my relationship, quit my job, and presented myself at Milford Graves’ door. I waited for almost an hour. When he arrived, I asked him if he would take me on as a student. It was an impulsive decision -- I was nervous I would be rejected on the spot, and I didn’t have another plan. He looked me up and down and said, “Come on in, we will see what the story is…”. Without another word, he directed me toward the purple drum kit in his studio. I grabbed a pair of sticks, took a seat and noticed the timbale in place of the snare drum. He sat down on an old, and slightly out of tune, upright piano, and we proceeded to play together, improvising for almost an hour. This marked the beginning of my time with Milford, my great mentor -- known to his students and his fans all around the world as the Professor.

The year before, in 2003, I had attended his solo concert at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts. I was already a huge fan. As a drummer who had interests in , free-jazz, folkloric music and the avant-garde, Milford Graves loomed large. Each river of the American underground seemed to lead to the ocean that was Graves. Milford was every heavy-weight drummer’s favorite drummer. I hunted down all the records I could find, each one presenting a percussive voice so intensely singular and dynamic, that it forced me to rethink my long standing relationship with the instrument entirely. I practiced drums listening to Nothing: Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble ESP 1965 on my headphones. I imagined myself as the third drummer in the ensemble, attempting to create counterpoint to the dense clusters of rhythm coming from Graves and Sunny Morgan. I read every interview and the books that Milford mentioned -- Helmholtz’s “On the Sensations of Tone” and Khan’s “The Mysticism of Sound and Music.” However, there was no amount of reading or listening to records that could have prepared me for the experience of seeing him live that year. The hour- long solo performance proved to be cataclysmic. I had never heard so many tones coming from the drum kit -- a brilliant lattice of melodic patterns, weaving in and out of each other, extending from the high frequency metallic punctuations of the hi-hat, all the way down to the subharmonic rumble of the kick drums. As the concert progressed I could feel my heartbeat changing, responding to the music. I entered the concert one way, and I came out different. It was then that I decided to throw my life in the air and find a way to study with Milford.

Private lessons grew into an assistantship at where I took a job as a technician, assisted Milford in his laboratory and taught his Intro to Percussion classes to freshman and sophomores. Graves was a generous and tireless teacher. Late into the evening, often past midnight, our private work expanded from the drumkit into the practice of Yara, a martial art he invented based on a synthesis of Kung Fu, boxing, West African dance, and a direct study of nature (including the praying mantis!). We also worked on bioacoustics, graphical programming, electronic music, gardening, music healing and polyrhythmic musical concepts applied across disciplines. I was now practicing drums to digital tracks Milford would create for me -- each containing a sine wave sonification of my own heartbeat or nervous system sound recorded in the laboratory. Within the first year, I asked if I could record class to both preserve and reflect upon the work we were doing. I knew I was in the presence of a living master, and I felt it was important to do my part and make a contribution to the history. I was learning, slowly, the central aspects to Milford’s kaleidoscopic philosophy. It is these recordings that form the foundational basis for Milford Graves Full Mantis.

I was soon filming Milford at his house with borrowed equipment. I would invite various friends to come down and record video, while I asked questions and helped with gardening or with other projects around the house. Little by little, over the years, clips and sequences would emerge out of the footage. I didn’t know what they would become, but I knew these clips had a special vibration -- one that I would later recognize as the central vibration of the feature film.

In 2007 Graves began to share unseen material from his personal archive. One hot summer afternoon in his basement in Queens, we threaded Super 8 footage taken on a 1981 Japanese tour with the legendary Japanese dancer Min Tanaka. As we watched the screen flicker, a younger Milford appeared in front of a Japanese forest, demonstrated Yara movements with focus and intensity, and then proceeded to disappear, absorbed by the quivering bamboo. In another reel from the same tour, Milford and Min Tanaka perform for a school for children with autism. The concert begins with the students sitting still.

Over the course of 20 minutes, as Graves plays the kit and Tanaka dances, the students begin to get up and dance, one by one, until the entire school erupts in a display of energy and joy. In the final frames, a single child remains, dancing beautifully in front of the drums as Milford plays the ride cymbal in 12/8. The child’s eyes are locked in with Milford’s, and I could feel the energy transmission between the two. At that moment, I caught my first real glimpse of the cinema that would become Milford Graves Full Mantis. Over the following decade, Graves continued to share selected personal archival material with me -- photos from the early days of Yara in his backyard dojo, performance photos, family pictures, heart-beat recordings, old flyers and playbills. He told me to find the original footage for a concert from 1973, during an under-documented period when his group opened for Carmen McRae in Belgium - “That is the real stuff Jake, we were really playing on that one.”

I filmed Milford in his garden, at Bennington, in concert. During this time, I also performed with him, triggering his electronic heart sonifications and projecting video of the garden. I often slept in the dojo when I would stay with him, becoming more intimate and familiar with his collection of masks, objects, figures, and books from nearly every continent in the world. Over time, I discovered some of the things Milford wanted to share most about his life, and especially about his creative process. I also began to understand what I felt most compelled to share and reflect back to him, regarding my experience as his student. I started to have an acute sense that the film was talking to me, and in turn, I was learning to listen to it and understand how to best help it become what it wanted to become.

In 2015 I asked my friend and fellow drummer, Neil Young, to join me in filming Milford’s solo concert with me at Brandeis University. I was extremely impressed by the footage Neil captured during the nearly three-hour shoot. Over the next two years, Neil jumped into the project wholeheartedly and became much more than a cameraman. He would accompany me to Milford’s house and take part in our lessons. We would spend extended hours focusing our cameras on the basement laboratory, on the garden, on the drums, and on the house itself. We shot hours of Milford’s performances at various venues on the east coast, including the documentation of his first-ever sculpture/sound installation commission for the Artist Institute Gallery in Manhattan. In 2016 I traveled to Stockholm for an electronic music residency. Instead of making music with the incredible collection of early modular synthesizers at the Elektronmusikstudion as I had intended, I spent the week editing footage, night and day, on my laptop. I almost never left the studio. The film was starting to talk loudly and forcefully, demanding action. It was there, in Sweden, that I carved out a basic structure for the first third of the film. When I returned to the States, my collaboration with Neil expanded into the editing room where we would set up our laptops side by side and cut scenes and clarify others, as if we were in a percussion duet. We both approached the material in an intuitive, rhythmic way in order to inject the film with the same sense of fluidity and intensity that are the hallmarks of Milford’s sound – each of us bringing our often distinct but complementary musical and visual sensibilities to the creative process.

Late in 2017, after a year of editing, we had a rough cut of the film in hand. I drove to South Jamaica, Queens, set up a projector and watched the film, sitting between the Professor and his wife Lois. After the film finished, Milford proclaimed, “Man, that’s me up there on that screen--that’s what I’m about.”

I was Milford’s student long before this film was completed. I continue to be his student to this day.

In many ways, making Milford Graves Full Mantis was one profound lesson among many that I have received over the past 15 years, and I know there are many more teachings I have yet to receive.

Jake Meginsky Director, Milford Graves Full Mantis DIRECTOR BIO: Composer/performer/filmmaker Jake Meginsky (b. 1976), a New Music USA award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in filmmaking, has collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Paul Flaherty, Arthur Brooks, and Bill Nace.

His work has been presented widely and internationally, including the Click Festival Copenhagen, Denmark), Standards (Milan, Italy), the Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), Beijing Today Museum and Jinse Gallery (Chongqing, China); throughout City at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Joyce SoHo, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Symphony Space, Judson Church, La MaMa, The Stone, The Flea Theater, Vision Festival, Roulette, Museum of Arts and Design, Center for Performance Research, Improvised and Otherwise Festival, and Free 103; in Boston, MA at Opensound Festival, The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, YDLMER Festival, Mobius Gallery, Le Laboratoire and the New England Complex Systems Institute; The Neurosciences Institute (La Jolla, CA), Context Art Fair (NYC & Miami), Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and the Arts Center for the Capital Region (Troy, NY), The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (Bard College, NY), DOT AIR Festival (Providence, RI), University of Iowa, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), Work in the Performance of Improvisation Festival and USDAN Gallery (Bennington College, VT), A.P.E. Gallery, Academy of Music, and the Sound and Space Festival (Northampton, MA), Pioneer Arts Center (Easthampton, MA), and the Mead Museum of Art (Amherst, MA). His work has also been supported by several organizations, including the Jerome Robbins Foundation, Bumper Foundation, National Performance Network, Vermont Arts Council, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Northampton Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Department of Cultural Affairs.

Meginsky’s work has been reviewed extensively in leading contemporary music, art and culture publications worldwide. Huck Magazine (London) describes Meginsky’s work as “constantly transgressing the boundaries between acoustic and electronic, analog and digital.” David Keenan called Meginsky’s 2014 solo record, L’appel Du Vide, “a hallucinatory electro percussion masterpiece” and in the WIRE Magazine review of the LP, Nick Cain writes, “the album uses little more than a couple of sounds, extracting often head-spinning complexity from a minimum of means.” Art In America Magazine says, “Meginsky’s digital concrète takes percussion to outer extremes.” Secret Thirteen (Berlin) calls Meginsky “one of the most adventurous minds in experimental music today.” L’appel Du Vide was included in the WIRE’s 2014 Top 10 Records of the Year for Outer Limits. Meginsky's Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes was listed in FACT Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2016.

Meginsky frequently collaborates with choreographers and has worked with Cori Olinghouse, Paul Matteson, Jennifer Nugent, Susan Sgorbati, Katie Martin, Wendy Woodson and Nora Chipaumire. He has a longstanding artistic relationship with Gwen Welliver. Welliver and Meginsky will premiere a new evening-length work at Gibney Dance Center (NYC) in 2018. Meginsky is the recipient of a New Music USA Live Music for Dance award for his original composition for Welliver’s Beasts and Plots, which premiered at New York Live Arts in 2013 and will be restaged at the Guggenheim in 2018.

His recordings can be found on NNA (Burlington, VT), Mantile (London), Second Sleep (Milan), Feeding Tube Records (Northampton, MA), Rel Records (Providence, RI), Open Mouth Records (Northampton, MA), Wooden Finger Records (Belgium), Ultra Eczema Records (Belgium), and Ecstatic Peace Records (London/Northampton). He recently remixed Body/Head’s (Kim Gordon & Bill Nace) “Last Mistress” for Matador Records (NYC). His latest solo LP, Gates and Variations, was released on Open Mouth Records in October, 2017.

CO-DIRECTOR BIO: Artist Neil Young (b. 1976) makes moving images, sounds and events. His film and video work has been screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film, Athens International Film Festival, The Machine Project, Nightengale, Good Night’s Sleep and Robert Beck Memorial Cinema. His video and sound installation work has been exhibited at Vox populi (), A.P.E. (Northampton) and Parsons Hall (Holyoke) galleries. In 2012, a six hour retrospective of his video diaries and travelogues were exhibited as part of Trickster’s We’ve Got Guests program in Rotterdam, NL.

For 15 plus years he has toured all over North America and Europe both solo, under the Bromp Treb moniker, and as part of the collective Fat Worm of Error, playing percussion and electronics. He has performed at an array of official and unofficial arts institutions such as ICA (Boston), High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music (Baltimore), Ende Tymes Festival (Brooklyn), Far Off Art Fair (Köln), Experimental Media And Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Block Museum of Art (Chicago), No Fun Fest (Brooklyn), Center for New Music (San Francisco), Kunstencentrum Belgie (Hasselt, Belgium), Instants Chavirés (Paris), Roxi (Frankfurt), Goethe Institute (Boston), OCCii (Amsterdam). His recordings have been released on Feeding Tube (Northampton, MA), Load Records (Providence, RI), Open Mouth (Northampton, MA), Ormolycka (Brooklyn, NY), Ultraeczema (Antwerp, Belgium), Death Bomb Arc (Los Angeles, CA), Ecstatic Peace! (London/Northampton), Körper/Leib (Naples, Italy) and many more.

Matthew Guerrieri, wrote in New Music Box that the “over-the-top physicality and deliberate unpredictability” which mark Young’s Bromp Treb performances “can be heard as either a

critique or a celebration of the questionable level of control we have over our own gadgets,” resulting in “the most optimistic electronic racket you’re likely to hear.”

Marc Masters, writing about his first solo LP in The Out Door proposes that Bromp Treb uses “a singular sonic vocabulary” where his “biggest genius lies in his coordinating conjunctions and dependent clauses – his endless toolkit of aural sentence structures that turn pointillist specks into textured musical color-storms. Yet somehow he also finds a range of timbre, tone, and mood inside all the solar showering; Concession Themes can be light or heavy, calm or consternating, funny or fractal.”

Since the late 90’s, Young has been programming experimental art events and building enthusiastic audiences. Projects have included performance and screening series such as the Bright Rectangle (1999 - 2003), the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange (2008 - 2010), Phantom Erratic (2011 - present), as well as The Peskeomskut Noisecapades (2011 - present), an outdoor winter landscape sound/performance festival held on the ice of a frozen river.

He has participated in residencies at Signal Culture in upstate NY (2016) and Deplayer in Rotterdam, NL (2009). In 2017, he was awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for his work in filmmaking. He lives and works in Western Massachusetts, North America.

MILFORD GRAVES BIO:

Milford Graves is a percussionist, acupuncturist, herbalist, martial artist, programmer, and professor. In 1945 Graves started playing on some odd drums left at his parents’ house by a tenant (he still rarely plays with a kit). In 1964 he met the at Michael Snow’s loft for an impromptu rehearsal and they asked him to join. He famously held court five nights straight, three sets a night, with Albert Ayler at Slugs in 1967. On July 21st of that same year, he played at ’s funeral, and Dizzy Gillespie, who couldn’t see the balcony where the band was, asked loudly, “Who’s on drums?” Mention his name to anyone who follows , and they know him from recordings like Albert Ayler’s and Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman, as well as his concerts with and . In 1972 he invented a martial art called Yara based on the movements of the Praying Mantis, African ritual dance, and Lindy Hop. In 2000 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and began to study human heart vibrations to better understand music’s healing potential. He received the 2015 Doris Duke Foundation Impact Award. Graves is Professor Emeritus at Bennington College, where he taught for forty years. Many of his former students still visit him in his basement office and studio in Jamaica, Queens, a space where his grandparents once had a community social club.

POOJA RANGAN, THURSTON MOORE, BYRON COLEY, MATT KREFTING AND WILLIAM HORBERG ON MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS

“I’m going right to the praying mantis. That’s the boss, not some human!” – Milford Graves

Milford Graves Full Mantis, a portrait of the artist Milford Graves, is an elegant piece of reportage, an exquisite endeavor that eschews the steakhouse-sized menu of music-doc clichés by opting for a mantis-level degree of focus on its subject. There’s no handholding through a career overview; no overly-verbose, laudatory talking heads plucked from the music press; no conceit to traditional narrative biography. What happens instead is that the film enters into and emerges from its subject in a spectral, twining way. By continually applying its own logic, the questions and philosophies that have propelled Graves’ decades of artistic and physical and scientific and intellectual travel are drawn into sharp relief.

The film takes up the challenge of Graves’ art and, like the many devices he’s used (hands, wind, sticks, brushes, etc.) to activate the surfaces of his many instruments (drum heads, vocal cords, the heart-ribcage-flesh apparatus of the chest, etc.), it dances upon membranes.

To put it simply, Graves’ world – a coppice between history and immediacy, between aesthetics and science, between heart and intellect – is rendered cinematically, in all its quivering, pulsing, kinetic life. This is filmmaking that helps remind us of the profundity of our most basic senses, and the rhythm that guides and glides with them. It’s like how Robert Creeley said that the dancing is in the dancing. It’s like that. Don’t try to analyze it. Just take it in.

--Matt Krefting, The Wire, Huffington Post

“Milford Graves Full Mantis is one of the best jazz documentaries ever assembled. Part of this is due to the decision to skip the parade of talking heads who usually populate such films, but even more stems from the amazing depth of the subject, Milford Graves himself. A shaman and master martial artist, in addition to being one of the planet's most brilliant percussionists, Milford harbors more layers of arcane knowledge than most sentient beings, and this film gets inside many of them. The live clips are unbelievably great, but some of the interview segments are even more mind-blowing. All of which makes for a singular viewing experience.” --Byron Coley, The Wire

"Milford Graves engages with our universe through contemplation and meditation where we coexist in a garden of timeless nature. Since the early 1960s he has struck a mythic figure in the lineage of New Thing/Free Jazz music and art. A theorist on rhythm defined by inherent emotional impulse (as opposed to a mechanism of strict repetition) he has consistently championed the idea that music is more than an art form to be mastered. In his world, sound is

a life force to be in tune with, through regard and respect. With patience and a clear devotion to the beauty of the practice and performance of music, both spirit and earth-conscious, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS as directed by Jake Meginsky, and co-directed by Neil Young, both experimental musicians from Western Massachusetts, is a portrait of one of the most fascinating lights in the lineage of late 20th century music. It is a sonic-visual ode to the ineffable magic of inspired and gracious living." --Thurston Moore, London 2018

"Much more than a music documentary, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema that actually learns from its subject, whose life does not fit easily into a conventional genre like the biopic. Like Graves's music, the film is uncompromisingly original in form, but it teaches us to watch and enjoy it." --Pooja Rangan author of: Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (2017)

"In 1972 the three coolest things in the world to me were jazz, movies and Kung Fu. was doing a set with his elementary school age son Denardo whacking the drums at Chicago's Jazz Showcase downtown.

A mile or two away the German new wave film director Werner Herzog was a guest speaker at the Art Institute.

And Everybody WAS Kung Fu fighting. David Carradine was kicking it on TV. Bruce Lee's Fists Of Fury was playing at the Riviera Theatre uptown.

Hiding that illegal pair of hard-wood nunchucks from your Mom was harder than hiding the bruises from when those swinging sticks swung around and whapped you on the skull.

Bap!

1972 was a great time to be impressionable, and I was duly impressed.

2018, the work of art that has made the biggest impression on me somehow also miraculously combines jazz, Kung Fu and Movies. I guess the times have changed, but me, not so much!

Jake Meginsky wasn't even alive in 1972, but his remarkable debut film Full Mantis seems to have emerged fully formed from the cinema of the 70's: a personal vision, poetically told, a portrait of an outsider hero that is warm and intimate, and yet staccato and political and uncompromising, just like its subject matter.

And what a subject!

Anyone who has ever heard Milford Graves play, or speak, or seen him float or crouch and spring, or been a part of one of his experiments in sound recording, knows that he is a musical scientist whose primary instrument is not the drum but the heart; who more than anyone I've ever encountered shows us what it truly means to "play from the heart".

Full Mantis is a young man's portrait of a elder sage, full of love and affection and appreciation for having gained access to a temple of knowledge, but it's also the work of an old soul, someone who somehow arrived at a mature understanding of how to transcend the limitations of the biographical musical documentary genre, who realized seemingly intuitively that you can tell the story of a person's life, or you can use that life to tell a story, in sound and pictures, not in words.”

--William Horberg, Producer of KITE RUNNER introducing the film at Film Society of Lincoln Center Art of the Real, May 6th 2018

FILM CREDITS Music and Words - Milford Graves Director - Jake Meginsky Co-Director - Neil Young Edit - Jake Meginsky, Neil Young Cinematography - Neil Young Producer - Jake Meginsky Co-producers - Neil Young, Gabe Chicoine, George Myers Camera - Neil Young, Jake Meginsky, Marcus DeMaio Sound Design - Jake Meginsky Animations - Milford Graves Re-Recording Mix - Ernst Karel Titles - Jeffrey Weaver Color Correction - Evan Schwenterly Post Finishing Facility - Modulus

MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS 91 MIN 2018, USA, In English Words and music by Milford Graves Directed by Jake Meginsky Co-directed by Neil Young