“Old Man Dancing,” number 18 on the 56-track double album Painting With John: Music from the Series by John Lurie, opens with John Lurie exhorting listeners to get moving. “Dance like no one is watching,” he beseeches over funk guitar and saucy horns, winking at the inspirational adage. “Even if you have a show on HBO!”
“Old Man Dancing” shares its title with an episode of Painting With John, a meditative and beautiful series that blended Lurie’s exceptional talent for storytelling with close-ups of his brushstrokes as he painted watercolors, along with the occasional surrealist skit. On the show, the song accompanies images of Lurie in basketball shorts and a tank top, dancing on a rock in the sun, flapping his arms between camera pans to his black sneakers. (In the same episode, he tells a story about scoring a Barney’s commercial for Glenn O’Brien, while drawing a bird with a fountain pen.) Was the song born first, or the scene? It doesn’t matter—the meta nature of the whole project underscores that to Lurie, the lines between each medium are porous. This might lend the album a self-referential quality for devotees of the show, but on its own it translates to a lovely and sprawling collection of intrepid banjo and deep-groove polyrhythms full of the spontaneity and deadpan humor that have defined Lurie’s work since he taught himself to play harmonica in the late 1960s.
Lurie is perhaps best known as the saxophonist of the Lounge Lizards, the experimental group that was active from 1978 to the end of the 20th century, and which he forged in downtown New York when living downtown in New York still meant something. Lurie has also, simultaneously, been an actor, visual artist, film scorer, and author—his 2021 book, The History of Bones, is one of the best-written musical memoirs I’ve read—and in 1991 created Fishing With John, the cult show in which Lurie took guests like Tom Waits and Dennis Hopper out on the water. Painting With John, which unfortunately ended in 2023, after just three seasons, was a slightly more hermetic show than its predecessor, though no less generous or ingenious. Much of its appeal was its fluent, often surprising soundtrack, and its portrayal of the way Lurie's life has shifted in recent years. Diagnosed with Lyme disease and then cancer, Lurie relocated to an undisclosed island in the Caribbean to reconstitute. He was unable to play music for a time. Now 72, he seems to think of this release as punctuation: In press materials, he said that the Painting With John music “may be the last thing I do. I want it to be beautiful.”
It certainly is beautiful, both a retrospective and temperature check of his current artistic yen. Lurie has traded his alto saxophone for banjo and guitar, shifting his melodies to a lower register. The album includes a handful of tracks from prior projects that were featured on the show—the melancholy clarinet melody “Goodbye to Peach” and a few others from the 1998 film scores African Swim and Manny & Lo; and “Small Car” from a 1999 album by the Legendary Marvin Pontiac, a fictional blues outsider that Lurie invented. The resurfaced songs thread Lurie’s earlier musical ideas—full of whimsy and acted-upon impulse, “first thought/best thought” in motion—into those he cultivates now, which can be simpler, sweeter, and funnier. On “Pygmy With Dog Barks,” a song as absurdist and literal as his paintings, a recording of a dog barking acts as a kind of rhythm section behind Lurie’s lightly plucked guitars—perhaps a reference to the music of the Central African Pygmies, one of his many musical passions. “Boomba!” is a 30-second vocal spurt that layers his distinct basso rasp with a wee-ooh-wee-ooh-we sound, invoking both Tuvan throat singers and a speeding toy ambulance. “Cowboy Beckett Jaunty Guitar With Hoo-Hahs” is exactly that—an Ennio Morricone-style guitar gallop with “hoo-hah” shouts on top. His penchant for naming these songs literally is as delightful as the songs themselves, though how a “song” should even be defined seems to be part of the question they pose; the latter is 18 seconds long, perhaps a gag on Morricone’s long spaghetti sagas, yet just as hypnotic, the abbreviated point still made.
Always a fulcrum for a dynamic cast of collaborators, Lurie’s curation here includes former Lounge Lizards—Steven Bernstein on trumpet, the late Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Doug Wieselman on guitar, Michael Blake on tenor sax and Calvin Weston on drums—as well as cellist Jane Scarpantoni and trombonist Clark Gayton, among others. The instrumentation might suggest jazz—“fake jazz” being a designation Lurie invented and then regretted throughout his career—but what transcends genre is just the pureness of the jam, not to get too woo-woo. There’s a playfulness in these songs, and a purity of intent, that seems to channel the human experience in all its beautiful weirdness. “A Goat Says Fuck” invites the listener to comtemplate whether goats’ bleats are hidden curses; its corresponding painting implies said goat is wracked with indecision between, maybe, hieroglyphics and inedible plants.
"I Don’t Like to Stand on Line,” from Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits, is a dirge or a death knell, Lurie wailing the title sentiment over an ominous and frenetic banjo twang. Alongside his painting of the same name, he reframes an everyday frustration as an existential question, a kind of black hole of time and the futility of the mundane. But, as with much of his music, it might also just be a lark. Painting With John’s final song, “The Invention of Animals,” is over 18 minutes long—the longest song here by six—and full of abandon, its percussion going ham in a mesmerizing fugue until the group collapses into a sweet flutter of sax and builds back up again. It’s brash and cacophonous, but there’s a tenderness to it, a fullness in the moment. The heart and the absurdity catch up with you.
