Actor Jason Schwartzman — a familiar face to Wes Anderson fans from films including Rushmore and Asteroid City — also excels outside of Anderson's world. Think: I Heart Huckabees, Marie Antoinette, and TV shows like Bored to Death and Fargo. His latest project is Between the Temples, a comedy directed by Nathan Silver, where he plays a grieving cantor who reconnects with a former teacher planning an adult Bat Mitzvah.
More: Go Between the Temples with actor Jason Schwartzman (The Treatment, 2024)
And Schwartzman is no stranger to KCRW. In addition to his multiple visits to discuss acting, he’s also been our guest DJ twice:
More: Jason Schwartzman: KCRW’s Guest DJ Project (2008)
More: Jason Schwartzman: Guest DJ Set (Morning Becomes Eclectic, 2010)
For his Treat, Schwartzman shares his admiration for organ players, captivated by the synchronicity of long, sustained notes that create a droning effect. He appreciates the beauty of organ "voicings," where minimal finger movement is needed to change chords, allowing notes to sustain across multiple chords. He draws a parallel to the harmony created by groups like the Beach Boys and The Four Freshmen.
More: Jason Schwartzman and Woody Jackson (The Business, 2012)
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I'm not an organ player, but one thing I love about a certain style of organ playing is — because the notes are very long, drawn out, almost droning-type notes — I love how in certain voicings on an organ to change the chord, all you really have to do is just move one finger.
The beauty I love when I listen to organ songs, and [I] look at what they're doing… is [that they’re] finding the notes that sustain through multiple chords and then doing as little movement as possible to get to the next chord. To me, that's really a beautiful thing.
The idea of these voicings and these close harmonies in relation to each other, and then when you start to break them down, just the way they move, just so subtly, has such a huge impact. If one note just moves a half step it can feel like an explosion, or it can feel dissonant, it can resolve things, and it's just these little moves. It's not geographically, like on a piano frame, you're not moving a great distance on the keyboard. It's just these little things, but it's each one doing it, just at its own moment in the relative time that it has with the note — [it] makes me freak out.
"'Til I Die" by The Beach Boys… like, these songs had harmonies. They hold them for a long time. It's like you could just sit there and listen to it. It's just, it's so complicated, and yet it's just little movements. So this idea of many things all happening at once, each at different levels, and then just each one making little changes on its own, but affecting this larger shape of something is something that I think about all the time.