High Flyer
Birdman, the 2015 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, is morbidly strange, technically stunning (the whole film is designed to look like it was shot in a single take), and features a slapfight at a vending machine with Edward Norton in his underwear. But the film’s backbone is its score, held together by the supercharged, polyrhythmic playing of jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez, an accomplished composer, four-time Grammy winner, and long-time drummer in Pet Metheny’s all-star Unity Group. Variety calls his Birdman score “memorable and unorthodox,” and JazzTimes writes that his drumming for the film, “infused with swing, funk, hip-hop, and Afro-Cuban elements, [puts] you behind the characters’ steps but also in their heads.”
Now, for one night only, Sanchez plays live onstage alongside a screening of Birdman, offering up the film to its listeners like never before.
Antonio Sanchez – Birdman Live: Thursday at 7:30 p.m. $10-30. Rated R. UMass Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, 151 Presidents Dr., Amherst. (413) 545-2511, fineartscenter.com.
— Hunter Styles
