"Blew my mind. I didn’t see it until I was middle-aged, after decades of thriving on the ongoing French New Wave. I thought of the New Wave as beginning in these subversive young Parisian cineastes’ love for American genre films. My jaw was dropped the whole length of Journey to see the sensibility and techniques of the New Wave appearing first in this Italian flick (though English-language, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). Later I read that Truffaut called it the “first modern movie,” and I believe he’s right. I haven’t researched, so don’t know if this is a commonplace, but, on a side note, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between Journey and Godard’s Contempt. They’re both about a couple whose marriage is failing, who are foreigners on a visit to Italy, where their stiff estrangement reaches a head amid the vital, pagan-slash-Catholic ancient culture of the area around Naples. Noble, erotically charged, millennia-old statuary reverently track-circled to swelling music. Local color, and travelogue landmarks of aesthetic and mythologically poetic power, integrated naturally into the story (almost Hitchcockian in a way, except with an emotional and intellectual justification). The most groundbreaking thing about it, though, is the way it’s not exactly a story, but rather a situation, depicted in fragments and episodes—the emotional situation of a couple, displaced within a continuously intruding, alien or disorienting environment, and one that keeps us conscious of death and history. A lot is pointedly artificial about it—to me the dialogue all feels like exposition, and is delivered that way, as presentation of the situation, rather than anything natural—or at least frankly cinema, but at the same time it feels like life in a way that movies hadn’t before."

"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"