Tales of Mystery and Imagination 2009

Here's a remarkably successful merging of outré creative personalities: Wellington-raised, Paris-based saxophonist Lucien Johnson; the founding father of American Gothic, poet Edgar Allen Poe; and veteran Kiwi filmmaker and iconoclast Geoff Murphy (Utu). Johnson has composed an exuberantly dark and eclectic jazz-rock-cabaret score to a suite of Poe's macabre poems and assembled a group of local avant-garde virtuosos to perform it with him. Musically, it's an amazing trip, referencing so many styles that it's like running the gamut of the dial on your radio – except that every unexpected change of station is a suavely swaying progression. Murphy filmed a concert of the work on the stage at Waimarama and then spent a year creating a CGI world of weird funereal splendour to elaborate on the band's dramatic enactments of scenes from the Poe texts. The briefest clip of Bruno Lawrence on drums is right at home: this carnival of the souls is as invigorating as any of the Blerta escapades that kicked a film industry into life here 30+ years ago. — BG