© George Chen
The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend William Hooker has been
exploring the adventurous borders of avant garde music with kindred spirits
like David Murray, David Ware, Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, Elliot Sharp,
Christian Marclay and many others.
In this performance he will improvise a live soundtrack to pioneering
African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film classic
The Symbol of the Unconquered, originally advertised as a chance
to come see “the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan.” Some of Micheaux's
earliest and most significant films were responses to D.W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation (1915), portraying the African-American struggle
against white racism and the KKK. Some of these films were lost for decades
and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black
hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is
passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying
Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him.
Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the
amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to
discover their shared racial identity.