Every year, Sean and I try to see at least one movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF). The most recent one was David Lynch The Art Life, which I had helped back via Kickstarter. But this, this was new! Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA bringing the ruckus to the Orpheum with his presentation of RZA: Live from the 36th Chamber of Shaolin!
RZA live scoring a classic Shaw Bros. kung fu movie using Wu-Tang’s 20 year catalogue of hip hop beats? Oh, hells yeah.
Didn’t we just had our minds blown with our most recent night out on the town?
A couple of pics taken from VIFF’s Facebook page:
Photos: Wyatt Fossett
After the movie, RZA (with his buddies Jon “DJ Skane” Lugo and Tom Shannon) took a few questions from the audience.
When asked about the origins of this venture, this is what RZA had to say:
“John’s a pretty good DJ as you can see. Tom in the same neighbourhood, also a DJ, wasn’t that good. But he’s the first person that I physically saw take video…he would get his VCRs, daisy chain them shits together, hook it to his mixer, his turntable and score cartoons with James Brown beats. First time I saw him do that. 14 years old. To me, technology didn’t catch up to what he was doing until 2007, maybe? And when it did catch up, I got the chance, actually, I’m an equipment geek, so they came out with the DVD DJ decks, and I was like, oh shit, I could do what Tom used to do. Right now. And I started doing it and Disney hired me to do it at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a big success. And that’s really the foundation of me doing this. When I started getting the chance to show it to audiences, I was like, yo, I’m going to call the originator and bring him with me. And here we are.”
If RZA ever tours your city with Live from the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, I totally recommend going. It’s more than just a movie experience, and it’s more awesome than a real-time orchestration of a movie by your city’s symphony group. Plus RZA and members of the Wu-Tang Clan in an intimate setting! Very rad.
Top photo: VIFF
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