As he did for the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” T Bone Burnett produced a terrific soundtrack album that may well have a life of it own to go with the Coens’ acclaimed new “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
And just as with that Grammy-winning bluegrass collection, Burnett kickstarted the excitement over the film and its music with a live concert filmed for a documentary film. The show that makes up the new “Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis'” (Showtime, 10 p.m.) was shot in New York in October, featuring performances from Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Gillian Welch, Jack White, the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst and Colin Meloy, as well as figures from the film, chiefly Oscar Isaac, who plays the fictional 1960s folksinger Llewyn Davis in the film, and Marcus Mumford who is heard but never seen as his ex-singing partner.
Will the film and the soundtrack help boost a new audience for folk music, as ‘O Brother’ did for bluegrass?
Burnett told me that movement is already happening.
“There is an ongoing Renaissance in American music, and there is a powerful group of young, 21st century musicians that are reinventing this traditional American music for this century,” Burnett said in an interview over the phone from San Francisco for a piece I was writing for the Washington Post.
“And they are so much better than we were in the last century at putting it together and understanding it,” he said. They’ve got a much broader knowledge and deeper understanding of it. And these guys like Chris Thile and Rhiannon Giddens and the Milk Carton Kids, these guys are so good.”
He went further: ” Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers are like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five. I think Chris Thile is the Louis Armstrong of this century. This music continues to be reinvented. I would say about this film, it’s part of that continuing reinvention.”
He’s talking about the Coens’ theatrical film. But the concert that was turned into tonight’s documentary was intended “to build a platform for them, because the whole infrastructure that was built for music in the last century has been dismantled, so we’re doing what we can to build a platform so these extraordinary 21st century musicians can be heard.”
“It was mind boggling,” said Oscar Isaac, the actor who stars in “Inside Llewyn Davis” said of performing in the concert. “And to be backstage was even more amazing. The impromptu jam sessions that broke out. At one point, it was Joan Baez standing next to Jack White, standing next to Patti Smth, and then the Punch Brothers and they’re all playing. I couldn’t believe I was even at that table.”
And while he at least had several takes to sing his music live in the Coen Brothers film, at the concert “we had just one shot of getting it right,” Isaac said. “So it was very scary, but also very invigorating and beautiful.”
For Carey Mulligan, who appears opposite Isaac in the film, performing live at Town Hall was “singlehandedly the scariest thing I had done in my life.” Justin Timberlake wasn’t available for the concert, so his part on their version of “500 Miles” was filled in by Elvis Costello.
“I was the only non-musician in the whole thing,” Mulligan said over the phone from Los Angeles. “And to be among Joan Baez and Patti Smith, these heroes, that was nerve-wracking to be among them.”
For Burnett, who has been a recording artist and toured on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder era bands, he said folk is always changing. “I think this music is being reinvented now as it was being reinvented then.
“There were people at the time, and Llewyn Davis was one of them, for whom there was no getting famous, there wasn’t the idea of getting famous, there was a small community of people in a park in downtown New York and they got together every weekend and some would play folk, some would play bluegrass and some would play jazz, and there would be all this competing music going on. And those people were all looking back, they were traditionalists.
“And Dylan come along and he was able to go backward and forward at the same time, and he advanced the music into this new century and we’re still now going through his work and going through all the things he wove together, the incredible tale he wove together and is still weaving together.
“but now the musicians, because we’ve seen Elvis Presley do it, we saw Elvis Presley take this beautiful folk music and turn it into rock and roll and then we saw Bob Dylan take this beautiful music and turn it into a whole different stream of rock and roll, the same with the Rolling Stones, we’ve gotten good at reinventing it. And these young kids Chris Thile and these kids are so good at it, it’s inspiring. It gives me reason to get up in the morning I guess.”