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Crosstown Arts presents the Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra – Live Score for “Haxan” in The Green Room.
The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: $20
Since 2019, Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra have performed several of Greene’s original scores for silent films before live audiences. In 2022, Greene was commissioned by the Indie Memphis Film Festival to compose an original score for the masterpiece of the Swedish silent era, Häxan, in honor of the film’s centennial, and it was a smashing success, receiving a standing ovation. Now, on Wednesday, October 30th, at 7:30 p.m. , The Green Room at Crosstown Arts will host a reprise performance of Greene’s Häxan score by the RHO as the film unfolds before the audience.
Billed as a “documentary” about the history of witchcraft, Häxan recreates supposed rituals and practices of demonized witches in lurid detail, often by way of exquisite art direction and cinematography. A monumental production for its time, the historical scenarios it spins take us right up to the modern clinical age. Taking you along for the ride are Greene and his band of players, matching every mood, from ecstasy to terror, with a haunting melody and beat.
Session keyboardist and composer Alex Greene (Reigning Sound, Big Ass Truck, the Kropotkins, Deepstaria Enigmatica) has four decades of experience in Memphis and New York, and has performed and recorded albums and soundtracks with the Rolling Head Orchestra since 2009. Whether he’s in singer/songwriter mode or leading a jazz band, his compositions combine strong melodic lines with unexpected, shape-shifting harmonies. With themes worthy of the Golden Age of Hollywood, mixed with more modernist sounds, and echoing artists as diverse as Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Sun Ra, the classic jazz sextet of the Rolling Head Orchestra is now augmented by the eerie wail of the theremin.
In 2010, the Rolling Head Orchestra scored the WKNO documentary Citizens Not Subjects: Reawakening Democracy in Memphis, leading to the album Depression Jubilee. An album of Greene’s songs, American Elegy, was released in 2018. The group has gone on to perform original scores for silent films since 2019 (when Greene was a Resident Composer at Crosstown Arts), including soundtracks for A Trip to the Moon, Aelita, Queen of Mars, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, and Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo, at venues as diverse as Crosstown Theater, Germantown Performing Arts Center, and Playhouse on the Square.
