Orcas Center and the Orcas Island Jazz Festival Present on Center Stage Marty Isenberg’s Wes Anderson Playlist An Interpretation in Jazz.
“I’ve always resonated deeply with Wes Anderson’s movies,” muses Isenberg. “There was something so familiar about the way he captured the ache of adolescence.” He appreciated how Anderson’s cinematic language always seemed to juxtapose our local vastness with our cosmic tininess. Of course, Isenberg loved the off-kilter mixtape quality of the soundtracks and how perfectly they mirrored the plot lines. So he set out to put his own spin on songs by artists like David Bowie, and the Velvet Underground but through the lexicon of jazz orchestration and improvisation. The resulting album is a sonic storyboard, a soundtrack to the wonder, loneliness, and nostalgia of life in the modern world. Downbeat Magazine’s glowing review says “Movies for your ears are somewhat cliched, but Isenberg has gone way beyond that. This is a movie.”
