Milford Graves Full Mantis

March 23 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 P.M.

Jake Meginsky and Neil Young, 2018, 90 minutes

“With patience and a clear devotion to the beauty of the practice and performance of music, both spirit and earth-conscious, Milford Graves Full Mantis . . . is a portrait of one of the most fascinating lights in the lineage of late 20th-century music. It is a sonic-visual ode to the ineffable magic of inspired and gracious living.” — Thurston Moore

“Come on in, we will see what the story is.”

That’s how jazz drummer and avant-garde percussionist Milford Graves greeted Jake Meginsky in 2004, when Meginsky, having just ended a relationship and quit his job, made his way unannounced to Graves’s front door. Graves ushered him inside to a drum kit, handed him a pair of sticks, took a seat at an old upright piano, and led the stranger through an hour-long improvisation. “This marked the beginning of my time with Milford,” writes Meginsky, “my great mentor, known to his students and his fans all around the world as ‘the Professor.'”

In time, Meginsky began filming Graves, and Graves in turn began opening up his archive of old, rarely-seen concert footage. By 2015, Meginsky had recruited friend and fellow drummer Neil Young to join him in the project that was gradually evolving into Milford Graves Full Mantis:

“Our collaboration expanded into the editing room where we would set up our laptops side by side and cut scenes as if we were in a percussion duet. We both approached the material in an intuitive, rhythmic way in order to inject the film with the same sense of fluidity and intensity that are the hallmarks of Milford’s sound — each of us bringing our often distinct but complimentary musical and visual sensibilities to the creative process.”

The result is a rare music documentary that captures the particular, ineffable magnetism of its subject, while also getting the live music right (so many films fail in this fundamental sense) and succeeding formally in cinematic terms. At its world premiere at the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam, audiences were mesmerized both by the film and by Graves’s epic and inspiring post-screening Q&A.

Milford Graves Full Mantis will have its US premiere on March 13 at South by Southwest and will likely enjoy a prestigious festival run throughout the spring. We’re pleased to present its Southeast premiere.