SONG NOIR

Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waitss career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles, from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the 70s, Waits absorbed LA's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the citys literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes.