Milford Graves

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

Filmed in and around percussionist Milford Grave’s last public concert in his neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens.

Using a device known as an electronic stethoscope, musician Milford Graves is able to hear and record the different patterns produced by each heartbeat.

On August 23, 2011, three days after Milford Graves’s seventieth birthday, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake cracked the soil near Mineral, Virginia. That day, the energy traveled all the way to New York City, where Jake Meginsky was filming Graves in his basement in South Jamaica, Queens.

In the months before he passed away, Milford Graves created the paintings that were displayed at the Fridman Gallery and Artists Space by vibrating the paint to the frequencies of old reel-to-reel practice tapes and the sound of his own heart.

Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology.

In the heat of the summer, in his backyard garden in Jamaica, Queens, Milford Graves sings to Ọsanyin, the one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged orisha of healing herbs.