We visit the set of Maria Bamford's Netflix show “Lady Dynamite” to see how she blends the absurd with autobiography. The filmmakers of the documentary "Song of Lahore" track how musicians revived their art form and found an international audience with their cover of the Dave Brubeck song, "Take Five." What's hot and not at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Maria Bamford's Netflix comedy 'Lady Dynamite' is absurd, fantastical and 100 percent Maria
It’s hard to sum up Maria Bamford’s new Netflix show “Lady Dynamite.” It swings from the absurd and fantastical to something that’s more realistic. But, as co-star Lennon Parham says, it’s all Maria.
Lennon Parham: There’s so much of Maria’s life real life in this show. A lot of the things that she legit has gone through are on display, but all super funny. So it feels very, I don’t know, brave and very intimate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=139Rd2QNzaE
Parham plays Larissa, one of Maria’s best friends on the show. She says that “Lady Dynamite” is great not just for the content, but also for the execution.
Parham: It’s totally unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s kind of barrier-breaking in that way. It is absurd meets grounded, meets breaking the fourth wall and an A.D. walks in and you’re like, “Oh my god.” And there’s like a dude in an Easter egg costume like, “What’s happening?” But also yes, more please!
While this is her first TV show, Bamford did have a web series in 2007 where she plays all of the characters — including her parents and her sister. Bamford says that before “Lady Dynamite,” she normally operated alone.
Maria Bamford: It’s the most time of human interaction I’ve had since high school, in terms of people every day, seeing people all day, it’s so new. You know, as a comedian, I’m alone all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHmNrxkuFU
Parham's own show “Playing House” is on its third season on USA. She recalled Bamford seeking her guidance for "Lady Dynamite."
Parham: I sat down next to her at the table read and she turned to me and she was like, “You’ve done this before, right? Can you give me some advice?” She just was like, “You’ve starred and executive produced your own show. Like, what do I do? How do I do this?”
One thing Maria Bamford uses both in her stand-up and on the show is her real struggle with mental illness. In 2011, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder.
Bamford: The way I’m portraying the mania, that is a little bit more ridiculous. And I mean it still has the same amount of pain, but I think it is gonna be more fast paced and more entertaining than what I actually went through, which was sitting in a hospital for seven days. [laughs] Which it’s hard to get that on film.
Bamford does portray other aspects of her life in a perhaps more realistic and intimate way. On set, they just finished shooting a scene that came directly from her life with her new husband.
Bamford: My husband and I, we’ve been been together for three years and I’ve never had a relationship in my life that lasted over a year out of high school. So it is spectacular. We are doing great! But in the beginning, we broke up for 24 hours once and so we’re reenacting that and it was just terrible, it was just really painful. But the nice thing is, it is kind of this healing thing of having my friends here, having it acted out, talking about it with my husband, like, what exactly happened. Yeah, it’s been really good so, I mean, not that show business is for healing relationships, but why not?
Season One of "Lady Dynamite" is now streaming in its entirety on Netflix.
In 'Song of Lahore,' Pakistani musicians fight social stigma to play the music they love
The quest for YouTube notoriety isn't just for teenagers. In 2011, Sachal Studios — a coalition of traditionally-trained musicians in Pakistan — posted a video of their rendition of "Take Five" by the American jazz master Dave Brubeck. The musicians were in search of a wider audience because their own country had become alternatively hostile or indifferent to their work.
The video was a hit. It earned the attention of Dave Brubeck himself — and then of jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who is also the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis invited the group to travel to New York City and perform a concert in collaboration with his orchestra.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy — who has won two Academy Awards for her short film — and Andy Schocken documented the musicians' journey in "Song of Lahore," which is now playing in theaters.
Obaid-Chinoy and Schocken spoke with The Frame's John Horn about the film and about the musicians' wider significance to Pakistani culture. Obaid-Chinoy, who grew up in Pakistan, reminisced on the social climate that made an organization like Sachal Studios a rarity.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Obaid-Chinoy: There are no formal music institutions in Pakistan. The way music is carried down is from father to son, uncle to nephew, in people’s homes. We had a very vibrant film industry. We had concerts, clubs, and cabarets. On Sundays on the streets musicians played. And then at the very end of the 1970’s, we had a general that took over the country, General [Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq], who decided that the Islamization of Pakistan was very important. Suddenly, the music industry started collapsing.
Because it was considered sinful.
Obaid-Chinoy: Yes. [Zia] closed off all the avenues that existed for musicians, and dried them, so they had no ways of earning money. The film industry collapsed. Clubs shut down, alcohol was banned. Cabarets were deemed illegal. And suddenly this industry that had existed no longer did.
No one ever said, It is illegal to play music. What they said was, If we take away all the avenues that are available to them to play music, no one will be able to listen. So they did it far more cleverly than banning music.
And also musicians are perceived to be in a lower social caste, so there’s a stigma against being a musician.
Obaid-Chinoy: Pop musicians are wealthy. They have this level of protection about them. But these are poor musicians that play instrumental music, and they live in sequestered neighborhoods where people do frown upon music. Where if you hear music, you’ll hear a neighbor — he might just come up to your door and say, This is un-Islamic. I don’t want to hear it.
So something happens in 2004 where a bunch of these musicians found Sachal Studios.
Obaid-Chinoy: Izzat Majeed is the founder of Sachal Studios. He is a philanthropist and a businessman. A Pakistani who lived outside of the country for many years, and came back in 2004. He wanted to preserve some of these instruments and these great masters who were dying. There are so many instruments in Pakistan where people can no longer play them, because the great masters have passed away and not passed it on.
So he came back to try to revive and find an avenue for these musicians to record their music. That’s when he set up a studio in the city of Lahore.
How does jazz fit into the narrative of what the musicians are trying to create?
Andy Schoken: At Sachal Studios they were putting out folk albums, traditional music. [But] they didn’t have a local audience . . . They basically decided that they were going to look West, and find an audience located outside of Pakistan.
In the 1950s the U.S. State Department had a program called Jazz Ambassadors. They sent some of the great jazz masters around the world — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck. And Dave Brubeck came through Lahore in 1958. The founder of the studio had been at the concert and he’d always been struck by that. So he thought, why don’t we try to integrate some of these Western harmonies into our music? As a way of keeping our instruments vital, and a way of keeping in touch with our classical roots, but in a contemporary format. So that’s when they first recorded their rendition of “Take Five.”
And what happens when they record a video of this song?
Obaid-Chinoy: They put it on their website, on YouTube — the single goes up in the digital charts. It becomes number one. Dave Brubeck heard this rendition and wrote to them and said it was the most interesting rendition of “Take Five” he had ever heard. And then Quincy Jones wrote to them. Then Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center heard about these musicians, and then invited Izzat to come to New York and figure out how they were going to have a concert and a collaboration.
So they these musicians come to New York. What happens when they go back to Lahore?
Obaid-Chinoy: Firstly, they made headlines. All the newspapers carried articles about them. Suddenly, all the television channels were interested in them. But more than that, I think Sachal always wanted to cultivate new audiences, and they wanted avenues to play their music. And once they went back to Pakistan, they were able to play a concert.
To them it kind of a bigger deal to play Lahore than to play New York because they’re playing for their own people. I remember one musician turning to the other and saying, “I hope somebody comes to the concert today.” And then outside when we walked in, until my eye could see, thousands of people [were] lined up. When the doors opened, and when the musicians walked out, the kind of response — the thunder of applause. So welcoming.
So what’s happening in the nation itself? Is it more accepting of music now?
Obaid-Chinoy: Well, with the Sachal musicians, and the kind of instrumental music they play, I think what they were able to do was make it cool.
But “cool” is still at odds with fundamentalist Islam.
Obaid-Chinoy: So, any music is at odds with fundamentalist Islam. But there is a huge push in Pakistan against fundamentalist Islam, especially in the last 18 months. The number of terrorist attacks have gone down exponentially. A number of avenues have opened up for artists and musicians that didn’t exist before. And I think that if we are able to hold the terrorists at bay, and that fundamentalist ideology, you will see some of this flourish again.
"Song of Lahore" is currently playing in select theaters. This segment was first published in November 2015.