Each episode of HBO’s “Painting with John” was at once seemingly random and sharply focused, united by the irascible charisma of painter/musician/actor John Lurie, co-founder of the Lounge Lizards and a downtown New York City art fixture in the 1980s. The plots, such as they were, emerged as organically as tendrils of brilliant watercolor branching out of fractal explosions in tiny chromatic ponds, like time-lapse flowers. There has never been anything quite like the show, and it was probably a miracle that it lasted three, nearly perfect seasons.
The original music was one of the show’s charms, whether created specifically for the program or drawn from Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, his film scores, or his records as (originally pseudonymous) alter-ego Marvin Pontiac. The musicians involved include long-term collaborators, notably slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein, drummers G. Calvin Weston and Billy Martin, trombonist Art Baron, tenor and soprano saxophonist Michael Blake, multi-instrumentalist Doug Wieselman, and many others.
Most of the 56 tracks included on this compilation are short cues, a minute or two long, detailed, multilayered, and as humorously mysterious as Lurie’s paintings. The two-disc set ends with the epic, 18-minute “The Invention of Animals,” featuring Lurie’s distinctive saxophone soaring over a complexity of percussion. But perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the show’s appeal is the Marvin Pontiac song, “Small Car.”
In the world of the song, tiny people in tin can vehicles go on a cheerful adventure in search of cosmic truth, only to realize when they get to the big city that the hulking outside world was not their place. “And so, they turned around and drove home,” Lurie says. “But they had had a nice day.” He emphasizes the final line. There is a noble and bittersweet acceptance in that line, coming from an artist who lost his iconic instrumental voice to debilitating Lyme disease and left a sprawling career in New York for a tree-hemmed house on a Caribbean island. And there is inspiration in seeing a transplanted talent bloom again.
In this set, the artist’s past and present interweave in ways strange and beautiful.
“Painting with John: Music from the series by John Lurie” (Strange and Beautiful Music) is available on vinyl ($60) and digital ($40) at John Lurie’s bandcamp page.
