Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones / Remembering singer Cassandra Wilson

0:00This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's Flex Path Learning Format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at Capella.edu. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. At this point, the Looney Tunes cartoon franchise has been around for almost a century. Warner Brothers launched the first cartoon under that name in 1930 and spent the next several decades supplying cinemas and then television with animated shorts that delighted adults as well as kids. The animators, who over the years included text-avery, Bob Clampett, Fritz Freeling, and Chuck Jones were brilliantly funny. So was Mel Blank, who provided the voices for almost all of the characters from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Elmer Fud and Pepe Lipu. Composer Carl Stalling supplied the memorable music for many episodes. And the combined canon included such 1950s classics

1:02as The Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera Duck, both of which were directed by Jones with music by Stalling and Voices by Blank. These cartoons and characters were widely adored by several generations, including mine. A streak of anarchy and a lot of violence ran through most of them. But as comedian Dustin Nickerson observed recently after trying to introduce these classic cartoons to his young daughter, they haven't necessarily aged well. More than a few characters have speech impediments, he notes, and lots of them exhibit very aggressive behavior. OK, you don't like that. Well, check it out. There's this skunk. She goes, what's he doing? He holds women against their will. Yeah, they're trying it away, but Pepe won't let him. Uh-uh. And all the other characters, what they're doing,

2:02is they're trying to kill one another. You know how, in your shows, they're all friends, they're not in these ones. They're trying to murder one another. There's this coyote who wants to kill this bird. The Looney Tunes franchise also got little respect from Warner Brothers itself. A few years ago, the studio, under new corporate management, shelved a completed movie, Coyote versus Acme, before its release as a financial write-off. The film comedy was based on a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, who imagined a lawsuit filed by lawyers representing one of the familiar Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Wilde Coyote. Said Coyote, of course, is the persistent but hapless predator who was in constant feudal pursuit of his fleet-footed quarry, the roadrunner. The Coyote never succeeded in his efforts, despite devising endless schemes employing rocket skates, spring-powered shoes, and other devices purchased from the Acme company.

3:04As his lawyers alleged in that New Yorker parody piece, quote, Mr. Coyote states that on 85 separate occasions, he is purchased of the Acme company here and after defendant through that company's mail order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling, unquote. The film version intermingled cartoon and human characters, like who framed Roger Rabbit, with the animated Wilde Coyote sharing the same screen as his human lawyer, played by Will Forte. The Coyote hires the lawyer after seeing him on a low-rent TV ad, the kind of small-screen huckstoring Bob Odin Kirk's sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman used to do on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Have you ever said a big stack of TNT on the road hoping to blow up your nemesis, but the detonator itself explodes? Have you ever pulled the rip cord of your parachute and only a bunch of silverware comes out?

4:05It's not your fault. Acme is evil. It's a very clever, very funny movie, but was buried deep in the Warner Bros. discovery vaults until it was rescued this year by an independent distributor which purchased the rights for $50 million and finally released it in theaters last month. Coyote versus Acme, written by Sammy Birch and directed by Dave Green, has been shown in relatively few theaters nationwide, but already has made almost all that money back in the US as well as an additional 30 million worldwide. Both the movie plot and the film's history are delightful stories of perseverance. So today on Fresh Air, we're saluting Coyote versus Acme and the long cartoon history it celebrates by listening back to an interview with Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. The cartoon that introduced the road runner and his nemesis, while E. Coyote was fast and furious in 1949.

5:09It was directed by Chuck Jones and introduced the running gag that recurred ever since. The Coyote ordering mail order merchandise to try and ultimately fail to catch the elusive road runner. In later cartoons, that company was identified as Acme which promptly delivered the faulty goods. That inspired the New Yorker article that inspired the movie Coyote versus Acme and, in a way, Chuck Jones, with his Acme idea, also might be said, to have inspired the entire rapid delivery concept of today's real life equivalent, Amazon. Chuck Jones worked at Warner Brothers from 1933 until the studio closed down its cartoon division in 1963. He then formed his own production company and kept producing and directing until his death in 2002. Terry Gross spoke to him in 1989. Jones also wrote an autobiography called Chuckamuck. That title is borrowed from Ducamuck,

6:10which was the cartoon Jones made about cartooning. In it, Daffy Duck finds himself at the mercy of a fickle cartoonist. Daffy opens the cartoon as a brave musketeer, but the cartoonist keeps changing the scenery on him to the most inappropriate settings, a farm, the Arctic, Hawaii. The cartoonist eventually erases not only the background, but Daffy himself. Would it be too much to ask if we could make up our minds? Hmm? Can you through the snow? Yeah! Ah! Sir, over here we go, laughing all the way! Farewell to Zee! Farewell to Will Zee! The wind will carry back our seven freckles! Hey, you know, one last embrace before we say, hmm, whos? Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon,

7:10and that an animated cartoon they have seen right, and in all the years, what's... All right, wise guy, where am I? You changed a lot of the characters who you worked with over the years. And can you describe when you first started directing Daffy Duck, who is always my favorite? When you started directing Daffy Duck, what was he like, and then maybe you could tell us a little bit of the character changes that you brought to there? Well, it's a little difficult to isolate them exactly, as to what I contributed, but I... All the characters I felt were part of me, particularly Daffy and the coyote, because they made the kind of mistakes that most of us make only multiply a bit. But Daffy is an interesting character, I think, because he would rush in and fear to tread at the same time. And he also could be faunting and overbearing at the same time. And I think that happens with very many of us when we... Sometimes in the reverse, when we go in to talk to the moss, and ask for a raise,

8:11and we were overbearing when we get inside, we're faunting. But Daffy is both at the same time. At the beginning, he was just crazy, as was Bugs, even in the first great... the wild hair of the text, the savory character. The character was really kind of mad, more like Harpolt Marx, perhaps. And I was never comfortable with the character, unless I could understand him. And I can't understand crazy people. So I always try to sort of pasturize my characters to find out who they are, the who is the whole point about character animation, is not what... He doesn't want a character to look like or indeed have it, they're on. You sound like a method animator. Well, I guess so. I don't think that I could do it unless I cared about the characters. In your cartoon, Duck and Buck, what did you choose Daffy Duck as the character that was going to be at the whim of the cartoonist? Well, I tried it later with Bugs Bunny and didn't work. Fortunately, I didn't remember Duck and Buck first,

9:11then I didn't want to call rabbit and ram page. And he also had the same problem. And the person in this case turned out to be on her foot that was moving him around, but it didn't work because that's not the kind of person that their Bugs is. Bugs is a comic hero, you see, as compared with a comic limp, which would go back to all the great comedians, starting with Chaplin and Buster Keaton and all the rest of them. They were all kind of semi-losers, aren't they? They're all like us. But I was like Daffy because he would continue beyond where I would stop simply because I'd be afraid of what the community would think of me. Daffy continues. But when I was working with him, all I had to do was reach down inside of me and bring the Daffy up to the service and spread it out and take a look at it and see what would I do if I had Daffy Duck's courage. You taught us a little bit about how you changed Daffy Duck and how you drew him a little differently, different characteristics he gave him. What about Bugs Bunny? What are some of the changes you brought to Bugs' life? Well, I think that one of the nice things about

10:12there were three units there after 1946. In fact, all the films and Warner Now Homes were directed by Frace Feeling or Bob McKimson or me. Bob Clamp had left in 1946 and taxed around 44. So we had these wonderful sessions. When I would get an idea for a film or my writer and I would get an idea for a film, we'd call in the other directors and writers and we'd sit down and have this session, which we called a yes session, which meant for two hours nobody could say anything negative. If you couldn't contribute to the idea, your job was to shut up. But usually the ideas were pretty good when they came in. Then the result of this was that we were all involved with each other's picture, although each director had absolute control of what went into his own pictures. But there was no internecine warfare. We liked each other and we wanted each other to succeed. But if I gave a great gag to Frace Feeling and he used it, and it appeared on the screen and got enormous laugh, I naturally wanted to go out and throw up.

11:13But because that's human nature, that's daffy duck in me. When you did your recording sessions, the voice sessions with Mel Blanc, what kind of suggestions would you make to him about the characteristics that he should try to be getting at through his voice? Well, for one thing, I would have completed laid out the picture all the key drawings that I would be giving to the animators had already been done. I would already have finished the exact dialogue. Mel never sat in on story things or anything like that. And in no way could we let any actor, Mel, or anybody else, had lived because we had to make pictures exactly to six minutes. So the dialogue was all carefully planned to fit into an exact six-minute format. So when I was ready for the actor usually, Mel, about an hour before we were to record, I'd call him in. The marvel of Mel was that he was such a brilliant actor that he could immediately get the idea of what you were talking about. All the great characters of the Warner Brothers cartoons

12:13were all animals. They're animals with the traits of people, but they're not people. They're ducks and rabbits and skunks. What are some of the advantages of using animals instead of people for the cartoons? Well, we had ample precedence to go on. I mean, going back to Asus Fables and Kipling and even Mark Twain did several things about animals and Chris Beatrice Potter and so many others. But the main thing is that it's easier to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans. And as you know from seeing Snow White and the poor princes and all the Disney films, it's very difficult to animate human beings. And when we did animate them, they didn't look very much like human beings. I mean, Elmr Fud doesn't look as any more like a human being than Bugs Bunny looks like a rabbit. Bugs is obviously not a rabbit. Rabbits look more like the average rabbit looks very much more like a pillow than anything else. However, I think that taking a rabbit and making him as heroic as Bugs Bunny is a light and more easy than it is to take a human being and making Bugs

13:16with Bugs as characteristics. You always believe that in a cartoon world that you have to create certain rules of the universe and the characters always have to live within those rules. Give us an example through, say, the Roadrunner, Wiley Coyote cartoons, because you created those characters. Yes. What's, tell us a little bit about the universe that you created them in? Well, there are several things that happen in all comedy. The more you channelize, the more you narrow the character down, the better it gets. The, for some reason, take Charlie Chaplin when he once got that little costume. Look how much he was restricted and what he can do. He can only be the little tramp. And he also limited the little tramp in pretty much into living in a city. Well, we felt that when we got the Roadrunner in Coyote going, it was evident that they both lived in the Southwestern American desert. And so you immediately say to yourself, that's where they lived, that's where they got to live.

14:18And the fact that the Roadrunner is a Roadrunner means that he should stay on the road. And there were a number of other rules about that that the Roadrunner can never harm the Coyote. The Coyote can only harm himself by buying those unfortunate things he gets from the Acme Corporation. And the more rules you apply, that you'd never hear any other sound except the beep beep. And I found that with going back into Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny is such a powerful character and he's a comic hero rather than a loser. He's such a powerful character that he could become a terrible bully. So we always started bugs. In every picture, we started him in a natural rabbit environment, minding his own business, a quiet living rabbit, something like Rex Harrison, perhaps, before he got involved with my very lady, ladies. And then someone comes along and tries to deprive him because his footer is life or he's, or sending him off into rock or something. And then he has to fight back, you see. And what once engaged in the war,

15:19then he's happily engaged. But without that, he would just be a bully. And there were some characters like Heckle and Jackle and even Woody Woodpecker at some time. I seem to go out and just Heckle people for no particular reason. And then the bugs never did that. And this is vital and necessary if you wanted the character to be believable and for people to care about him. I grew up on the Warner Brothers cartoons and the older I'd get, the more jokes I'd get. But I never realized I was missing anything when I was young. Because I always liked them. And now as an adult, I see things that I didn't see when I thought I was getting all the jokes when I was an older kid. Did anyone at Warner Brothers ever give you an argument that certain things there would go over the heads of the audience? Well, yes they did. But we didn't pay attention to them. We always had going battles on with our producers. So they would issue e-dicks like don't make any pictures about bull fights, bull fights aren't funny. Without immediately we would say, well, obviously the guy has always been wrong. So we would picture about a bull fight and it turned out fine.

16:21No, we had very little problems. Our producers were not very bright. I remember once seeing a short film that was a combination of kind of pornographic cartoons that some of the Disney animators drew in their off hours. And it ended up getting into circulation. Did you guys ever do anything less of Warner Brothers? Yeah, everybody did. In fact, sometimes when in a Pappy LePue picture, I'd put a little salacious one frame and 124 of the second. And I'd actually put it in the picture. And then I'd ask the office manager to come here. I said, there's a little glitch here. I just heard a hop at this point. I don't know what it, I can't figure out what it is. Then I'd bring it to a stop in the movie Ola. And that thing when you look through. And there would be, you know, well, I knew nobody could ever see it because it was only for the second. But then he would go into shock, you know. And we always had a frame to replace it just in case. But I enjoyed doing that. I kind of put him in his place. So did he make you take that out? Or did those frames still? No, no. I told him it was too late.

17:22And because money to take it out, nobody would ever see it. But I had already inserted it. It wasn't there anyway. But I did it to see if I couldn't put him into it as we used to say, reduce him to moccasins. Well, any of your scenes or any of your language ever censored? No. No, that was left to the brilliant people in the networks. And they take out things and make the whole thing incomprehensible. Did that happen a lot that you thought your cartoons were butchered when they got on TV? Yes, they were. Both at CBS and ABC to name a few of the guilty ones. What's curious to me is that they feel it was necessary to chew up those cartoons. But Nickelodeon, which is a program that supposedly design for children, sees no need to do that. I'd imagine that the cartoons that had gotten the most objections because of the violence with the roadrunner cartoons. Since they're all chase. Well, that's absurd, though, because the roadrunner never harmed the coyote. The coyote was only a victim of his own ineptitude.

18:24So the idea that there was any violence involved there is ridiculous. Did you ever think of yourself as doing a pop kind of surrealism? I did some. They tell me. But I never did anything. By sitting down and saying, I'm doing this for a reason. What I was trying to do was to develop the characters that I understood and have fun doing. And that was the whole secret of Warner Brothers cartoons is a bunch of people. I happened to come together from varied walks of life, all of whom were enormously interested in making films that were fun to do. Chuck Jones, speaking to Terry Gross in 1989, he died in 2002. Coyote versus Acme, the little movie that could is still chugging along in theaters nationwide. Will Ender animated salute to Coyote versus Acme with another Looney Tunes clip? This is from Daffy Duck for President, a 2004 cartoon based on the 1997 Children's Book of the Same Name

19:27written and illustrated by Chuck Jones. Eh. What's up, Duck? What's up, Edson? I'll tell ya what's up. When I'm president, I'm going to pass a law that'll outlaw rabbits. That, my poor unfortunate, soon to be condemned, this B.B. is what is up, very ingenious solution to a long smoldering problem. But there's just one slight technicality. The president can't pass laws. The president can't pass laws. That's ridiculous. The president can't do anything. Anything he wants. He's just like a king. Only better. He's better all right, but he's no king. Since so right here, you're outnumbered good buddy by the founding fathers. Foundling fathers. Ha! But some Uly infants know doubt. What do they know? A constitution, let's see here. Oh, yeah. The president, it's responsible for enforcing the laws. Congress makes the laws. You mean I've got a run for Congress?

20:29Well, cheer up, Duck. There's been a lot of funny boys sent to Congress, but you may be the first Duck to be elected. At least you're not a lame Duck. Duck to duck to duck to duck to duck to duck to duck to duck. Coming up, Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has an appreciation of Cassandra Wilson, the jazz singer, songwriter, and producer who died earlier this month. We'll also play an interview with her from our archives. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the What If We Get It Right podcast, hosts Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Bill McKibbin dig into climate solutions, the midterm elections, and how the planet can win on What If We Get It Right wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Jerry, noticing your car insurance rate creep up, even without tickets or claims. You're not alone.

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22:30This is Fresh Air. I'm David Beane Cooling. Singer Cassandra Wilson died in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi on September 2 at age 70. She first attracted attention in the 1980s, singing tricky songs by jazz composers, Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman. Soon, she was recording albums of her own, where she featured a wide variety of material and became one of jazz music's breakout stars, performing on screen in the movie's junior and the score. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead, surveys Cassandra Wilson's 30-year recording career. Skyfall. Have you seen the valley green with the spring? Where my heart can go, we're changing. Over the shadows and the rain,

23:30to a blossom covered land. Cassandra Wilson circa 1986, early in her recording career on a tune she'd revisit, Hugi Carmichael's Skylark. She was then in her early 30s, showing all the markers of her mature style, the love of a drowsy tempo, a dusky tone quality, the dramatic lows her contrato voice could reach, and a sultry persona. Also the way she'd swallow an occasional syllable. Wilson, her jazz singer, is growing up, but began her performing career accompanying herself on guitar and Mississippi coffee houses. She moved to New York in her late 20s and fell in with saxophonist Steve Coleman's circle of progressives who wrote their own music as she did. That crowd played on her early albums, which mixed standards with original tunes. This is Cassandra Wilson's subatomic blues with Steve Coleman on Elton.

24:30We are like the islands in the street. So long it seems. To the day we die. Growing on forever. Cassandra Wilson, from her second album, 1987's Days Away. Another Wilson song on that one, showed her admiration for bebop singer Betty Carter's rapid fire articulation and Abby Lincoln's philosophical lyrics. Graham Haynes, Baxter on Cornette on If You Only Know How. Do you recall when every day was the brand new day? Nothing was in a way. And people chased every rainbow. If I could, I'd buy a gold,

25:31but it was easy. If you only knew how. We take the trip. We take the trip tomorrow. Get our homework. We build the ship. We build the ship and sail. All the way to Madagascar. Did we forget our children crying, cried for the moon? Knowing the man inside is just lonely old food. We've seen a song for him to sing. Singing was easy. If you only know. Funk and hip hop were also part of the mix early on. Wilson's label pushed her to make a swinging album of standards that very fine, blue skies from 1988. By now, Wilson had come into her own as interpreter of lyrics. With her low vocal range, her high notes aren't so very high,

26:32but still have a soaring quality. Her phrases might float over the beat. Music started and was either the cast one. I held my breath and said, May I have the next one? In my finders, vocal darts and movements. Sparkle on a prognosis ring. There were questions in the eyes of other dancers. As we floated over the floor. There were questions by my heart. New all the answers. And perhaps a few things more. Terri Lynn Carrington on drums. The album Blue Skies was a jazz hit. The successful, straight up jazz career was Wilson's for the asking. But Cassandra Wilson had bigger ideas.

27:34In the 1990s, working with producer Craig Street, she made music seemingly designed to resist categorization as jazz or anything else. Take her chant Redbone, a character sketch of a hard living, hard praying woman. It mixes blues and gospel themes, Cuban percussion, and a squirrelly pedal steel guitar. And the night bone girl's on the bottom. She loved her god, she preys every night. She lived real hard, now that bone girl's on her head. She loves her god, she preys every night cause she lived real hard and bone. Cassandra Wilson's guitar was a jazz hit. guitars would be central to Cassandra Wilson's sound ever after.

28:35Old school country blues was another part of the mix. Most of one album was recorded in a Mississippi train depot and their joining boxcar. She got more attention covering radio pop, she'd heard growing up. Songs like Last Train to Clarksville, Two Below Honey, and Jimmy Webb's Country Pop Classic, Wichita alignment. Cassandra Wilson in 2001. Her slow, understated murmuring numbers had a great sense of mood and she did a few of those.

29:35By the new century, she'd become a bonafide jazz star, filling big halls and looking the part. One album was called Glamored. Her last husband was a minor movie star. In her final decade, Cassandra Wilson quietly withdrew. Her last record, the lavishly produced album of Billy Holiday Covers coming forth by day, came out in 2015. That year she moved back home to Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born. While her groups went through some changes over the years, her distinctive vocal style was there from the first and she stuck to it with confidence. And much as she defied category, Cassandra Wilson was the defining and dominant jazz singer of her time. She was a real original who left us much good work to remember her mind. I say I'll go through fire and I'll go through fire. If he wants it so, it would be.

30:36Crazy, he calls me. Sure I'm crazy. Crazy in love, you see. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead. He's the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz and Play the Way You Feel. His piece commemorated Jazz singer, composer and producer, Cassandra Wilson, who died last week. She was 70 years old. Coming up, we listen to Terry's 1988 interview with Cassandra Wilson. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from Granger. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running as a top priority. That's why he chooses Granger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRanger.

31:39Click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done. This message comes from NPR sponsor, The What If We Get It Right podcast. This season, climate insiders, Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Bill McKibbin get to the heart of the politics of climate solutions, from AI and energy bills to public lands and superpacks. Each week through the midterm election, along with expert guests, they get to the heart of what's at stake and how the planet can win. Only on What If We Get It Right, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. We're remembering Jazz Singer Cassandra Wilson, who died earlier this month at the age of 70. Wilson was influenced by Jazz Singer's Sarah Vaughan, Abby Lincoln and Betty Carter, but she didn't follow strictly in that tradition. Her singing was spiced with funk, hip hop and blues. Terry Gross spoke with Cassandra Wilson in 1988. She told Terry she first got noticed at a club in New York City called the Jazz Forum.

32:41That used to be a place where young musicians would go to sit in when they came to town. It's like the place people tell you when you come to town. If you want to sit in or if you want to get into some music, meet some musicians, go to the Jazz Forum. There I met a great pianist, Sadiq Khaykin, who's no longer with us. He took me under his wing and he really liked me and introduced me to a lot of musicians and actually got me my first gig. As you started getting more serious about singing and singing professionally, what are some of the things you wanted to learn and some of the things you wanted to change in your own style as you got deeper and deeper into it? For a while, I did want to become more technically accurate in terms of my voice. I always felt that that was a weakness that I had, not actually singing chords, actually singing changes.

33:43As if you noticed when a lot of singers improvise, they tend to deal with a very simple universe when it comes to improvising. That's one thing I always wanted to work on and I still work on to this day. It's like learning actual changes, singing changes and hearing more complicated types of intervals. Using some standards, but not many, at least not on your albums, are you trying to sing some but to emphasize original material? Yes, I'm heading in that direction. I would like to get to the point where I do all original material. I enjoy doing standards, so I really get a lot of fun out of it and enjoyment out of it. There are people who tell you, well, if you do standards, then you should do all standards and there are people who tell you that if you do original music, you should do all original music.

34:46I just pretty much paid attention to my intuition in terms of that. Everything that the standards that I choose, I think, fit inside of the whole body of work that I do. You sing, let's face the music and dance on your latest album. Did you arrange that yourself? How did you decide to interpret that song? That is one of the songs that many great singers have sung before. Henry Threadgill suggested that tune. He suggested that tune to me. I was shocked that he suggested it because Henry is not really the type of musician who gets into the standard repertoire, but he really liked that song. Everything just happened in terms of the arrangement. We got into a rehearsal with it. I heard it very up, you know, very bright, and finally heard it like with a trumpet solo out front. That's the way it happened.

36:34I want to ask you about another piece on your latest album. The piece is called Apricots on Their Wings. It was composed by Henry Threadgill. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this song? I really don't know with you. Henry told me that it was... I never understood the lyrics. I mean, I just had to one day I came out and asked him, what does this mean? He said, well, it's kind of a nonsensical type of a lyrical thing. The words sounded pleasant to him, and they worked well together lyrically. So he put them together. How important is it as a singer to really understand and even relate to the lyrics that you're singing? Well, it depends on the material for something like Apricots. I just got a lot of joy out of the melody of that tune and just the way it moves. So it was always just... I somehow intuitively could feel what it meant and, you know, just from dealing with the sound of it.

37:47Yeah! I reach for the star and a moment. I reach for some sunlight and I got some wood. I smell the course of milk you were. On a hazy, lazy day. It's such a crazy one to try and get the work. You do some nice scatting on the beginning of that piece. Was that improvised or was that composed beforehand? No, I was completely improvised.

38:48Do you like scatting? Oh, yeah, I enjoyed very much. In fact, I don't really call it scatting. I think that scatting is like a... That's taken from a bebop era where vocalists tend to try to imitate horns. But what I do, I really don't try to imitate horns. I just improvise and create sounds that are distinctive to the voice. And sometimes it just so happens that they do sound like instruments, but that's not the initial approach, you know, to sound like an instrument. I like the idea of being a voice. You said before that some people tell you to just sing standards or to sing no standards. Everybody's got an opinion, you know, it's like, oh, you should do this. Have your musician friends discouraged you from singing standards? Yes. Some musicians really think of singers as just being pretty props to do put in front of musicians and they don't really respect them that much.

39:50I don't know. You know, and that's why I think standards get that kind of reputation because they're associated with the things that singers do. You found that kind of stuff to be true? Yeah, I think that's the suspicion of singers and standards. I think the distrust of singers comes from something that it's based on something that historically is true. Singers tend to move into the music without very much of a depth of knowledge in music theory. And so I think as a result of that, musicians just tend to like disrespect singers because sometimes when they get up there, they don't know, you know, a lot of them, they don't know what they're doing. They're not really functioning as musicians inside the group. They're functioning as simply singers. And do you want to function as a musician inside the group? Well, I do function as a musician inside my group, inside of any context that I am because basically that's what I am. I'm a musician. Who sings? Cassandra Wilson speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. She died last week at the age of 70.

40:57I don't know where we're going. I don't know where to hide this feeling. From the beginning, I'd been swinging in the current of your skin. The autumn rains turned into thunderstorms, the waters rose. I was drowning in your eyes, but when I woke up in the morning, I was breathing. I was breathing all I was love. I saw another country in your eyes. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from Granger. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running as a top priority.

41:59That's why he chooses Granger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRanger. Click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done. This message comes from NPR sponsor. The What If We Get It Right podcast. This season, climate insiders Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Bill McKibbin get to the heart of the politics of climate solutions, from AI and energy bills to public lands and superpacks. Each week through the midterm election, along with expert guests, they get to the heart of what's at stake and how the planet can win. Only on What If We Get It Right, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. Our film critic Justin Chang recommends the Monster Movie Hope, which takes place in a South Korean border town that becomes the site of an alien invasion.

42:59It's the latest from the director Nahongjin, who's known for his thrillers such as the Yellow Sea and the Wailing. Hope is now playing in theaters. Here is Justin's review. The South Korean filmmaker Nahongjin has directed four feature films over the past 18 years. They're terrific, if not for the faint of heart. I still remember watching Nah's 2008 debut, The Chaser, and thinking I'd rarely seen a more brutally relentless thriller or a darker statement about the elusiveness of law and order. His next one, The Yellow Sea, was even better, a gripping mob movie that was also a wrenching portrait of a Korean Chinese immigrant on the run, a man without a country. Nah is a master of tone and genre, and there's a genuine moral undertow to his movies, even as they balance comedy, tragedy, and bone-crunching violence. Nah's latest movie, Hope, is a big step up in ambition. If maybe a step down in finesse. It's been divisive, passionately praised and witheringly dismissed, sometimes in the same breath.

44:11It's a sprawling, big-budget monster movie set in a remote South Korean town that comes under attack from giant shapeshifting aliens. That made it an admittedly odd choice to premiere and competition at the recent Cannes Film Festival, though I was grateful for the genre movie diversion, and floored as usual by the robustness of Nah's action chops. Even Hope's dumb stretches, and it has them for sure, are touched by brilliance. The movie blurs the lines between schlock and art. It begins in a town called Hope Harbor, located near the border with North Korea. The surrounding countryside is full of barbed wire and undetnated landmines. The residents are used to being on high alert. Get their most dangerous enemy hails not from across the border, but from the skies. Extra-terrestrial monsters have descended and laid waste to the town. The local police chief, played by Huang Jiamin, arrives late on the scene, and it's through his eyes that we see the destruction after it's already happened.

45:19But we don't see the monsters right away. For roughly the first hour of this more than two and a half hour movie, Nah steers us through a dim labyrinth of damaged stores and homes, building up our nervous anticipation seen by scene. Like the Steven Spielberg who made jaws, Nah knows that the less we see, the scarier things are. Indeed, it's a bit of a disappointment when we finally do get a clear look at the monsters, who resemble creatures out of a zombie apocalypse video game, circa the early 2000s. But this isn't a deal breaker. The CGI may be third rate, but Hope has some of the most exhilaratingly sustained action scenes I've seen in years. Nah has a strange ability to juggle nerve-shredding realism without landish, almost slapstick level of violence. Watching his characters tear through the streets with a monster in a hot pursuit is like watching the Steve McQueen classic bullet, a Mad Max movie, and a Looney Tunes cartoon rolled into one.

46:22And there's an extraordinarily beautiful sequence in the woods, in which the pursuit takes place on horseback that has the majesty of a western. There are lengthy stretches of downtime, during which we get to know the people of Hope, most of them prickly types with salty mouths and big guns. The character development is minimal, but the performances stick with you. Shanghoyeon of Squid Game fame is terrific as a plucky police deputy, who's a demon behind the wheel. And Chowin's song is hilarious as an erasible hunter who stares down one of the aliens and turns out to have more lives than Wily Coyote. As for the aliens themselves, Nod deliberately keeps us in the dark and off balance in terms of who they are, where they come from, and what exactly they want from planet Earth. It's worth noting that they are played by well-known Hollywood actors including Michael Fassbender, Alisa Vikander, and Taylor Russell. Though it's hard to recognize them under so many layers of CGI, especially given the incomprehensible language they speak.

47:29Part of me wondered if Nod were making a rye commentary on the inequities of blockbuster filmmaking by pitting his Korean ensemble against a bunch of better known Hollywood stars. But then in the final minutes of Hope, a truly bizarre narrative reversal occurs. Let's just say that the movie squeezes an entire film's worth of backstory into five minutes, and suggests there's more to these extraterrestrial beings than we might have thought. The movie ends on a laughably abrupt cliffhanger, but one with a touch of self-awareness. Nod has already said in interviews that he's planning a sequel. Will the next movie clear up some of our confusion? We can always hope. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. Hope is now playing in theaters. Hope is the thing with feathers, purges in the soul, sings the tune without the words, and never stops it all, and never stops it all.

48:39On Monday's show, Reanne and Giddens, she plays in Sing's music from the Black String Band tradition dating back to Slave Times. She's the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble. She won a Pulitzer for co-writing an opera, and played Banjo on Beyoncé's Texas Hold'em. Giddens will play Banjo, Fiddle, and Sing on our show. I hope you can join us. Never stops it all, and never stops it all. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash This Is Fresh Air. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests behind the scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producers today are Roberta Shorock and Thaya Challener. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Stanishevsky.

49:43Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yacundi, Anna Balman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CB Nesper. Our social media video producer is Hillary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Inkud. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's Flex Path Learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at Capella.edu. This message comes from Scholastic with Flight, the powerful new novella from the number one New York Times best selling author of Refugee Alan Gratz.

50:43This gripping and timely story details one young girl's life or death immigration journey and the courage it takes to start over. New from Alan Gratz, Flight, a story of seeking refuge, is available now wherever books are sold. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the What If We Get It Right podcast. This season, climate insiders Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Bill McKibbin get to the heart of the politics of climate solutions from AI and energy bills to public lands and superpacks. Each week through the midterm election, along with expert guests, they get to the heart of what's at stake and how the planet can win. Only on What If We Get It Right, wherever you get your podcasts.