THE FIRM RECORDS

Life. Support. Music.

(Documentary about Jason Crigler) 

Fast on his way to becoming a rock star, Jason Crigler's life as he knew it suddenly ended on stage on August 4, 2004. The singer-songwriter, who had performed with Linda Thompson, John Cale and Marshall Crenshaw, suffered a freak neurological incident that left him unable to care for himself or for his pregnant wife. Exploring similar terrain to Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Eric Daniel Metzger follows up his True/False favorite Chances of the World Changing with another exquisitely filmed story of determination and destiny. Metzger uses shatteringly intimate footage of the Crigler family, who never give up hope even during the darkest moments, and of Jason before and after the incident. By film's end, he has painted a poetic portrait that reveals the power of love, the indomitability of the human spirit and the undeniable healing properties of music.

PLAYING AT THE TRUE | FALSE FILM FESTIVAL

THIS WEEKEND 

Columbia, Missouri

Saturday, Mar. 1 / 12:30PM / Forrest Theater

Director Eric Metzgar; 2008; 79 min.

PREVIEW

Time Out New York - Top live show

Cunningham, Crigler and Hill + Kinney

Even if foot surgery earlier this month hadn't left him on crutches, Chris Cunningham (Neverwas) might have played seated at Banjo Jim's. Now residing in Minneapolis, the former Contortions, Lounge Lizards and Golden Palominos guitarist prizes instrumental precision above all else—invention excepted. On Neverwas, released in May on the fledgling Firm label, he turns exception into rule.

Granted, a few tracks—opener "Friday Cane" for one—hew to the tried-and-true singin', strummin' and sentimentalizin' tactics exploited by everyone from James Taylor to Vetiver. But they're just setups for the likes of "Iceberg." Delivered wistfully and unironically over lambent fingerpicking, in a warm baritone that suggests a woodsy Scott Walker, the chorus's wistful "Just cop some Pakistani brown / In the shadows / Of the railway station / In Freiburg" stands out like a pachyderm in a Jacuzzi.

This week's engagement finds Cunningham mingling his cosmopolitan campfire songs with compositions by like-minded journeymen and frequent collaborators Jason Crigler and Timothy Hill. While it's unlikely that Hill will bust many of the Tibetan singing moves he honed during 30 years in David Hykes’s Harmonic Choir, Cunningham's presence is pretty much guaranteed to endow Hill's relaxed-fit jams with otherness aplenty. Ditto for Crigler, a vet of Marshall Crenshaw’s and Teddy Thompson’s bands who’s now miraculously gigging again nearly three years after a cluster of burst cerebral blood vessels almost delivered him to the Reaper. Michelle Kinney, a monster of cello adept at everything from drones to jazz, might open, if she doesn’t get stuck hauling hubby Cunningham’s guitars.

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