Among John Lurie’s many credits: He co-founded and played guitar and saxophone with downtown NYC faves the Lounge Lizards beginning in the late ‘70s; he wrote scores for more than 20 films, including Get Shorty, Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise; he starred in the last two of those films; he conceived and starred in a TV series called Fishing With John; he paints. It’s that latter vocation, on which he’s concentrated since contracting Lyme disease, that led to Lurie creating the HBO series Painting With John in 2021. It ran for nearly three seasons before the network pulled the plug, but Lurie had all of this music he’d created as a soundtrack to the show and, hey, why let it go to waste? So, here is Painting With John, ostensibly that soundtrack but also a stand-alone double-album collection of 56 decidedly eclectic pieces, ranging in length from under a minute to more than five, fitting into no particular stylistic slot and all the better for it. The music—from simple and spare to dense, surreal and psychedelic—wasn’t concocted to roll along in any sequence the way a normal album does, nor to tell a story, so the listener, in a sense, is agreeing by default to take it all in as is and allow it to have whatever impact it might have. That can be jarring at times—the minute-long “Unky G” is little more than a funky blues progression; “Banjo to the Fuzzy” isn’t fuzzy at all, but it is all banjo; “Habba Happatoo” is—hmm, what is it, exactly? And, really, why attempt description anyway? Much of Painting With John is best experienced rather than dissected—a painting that isn’t clear in its intent and open to interpretation. Absorb its embrace.
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