Kid Koala brings ‘Storyville’ to SFJazz
In the world of competitive scratch DJs, it’s one thing to impress judges and get the crowd on your side with a tight five-minute routine. It’s a complete anomaly to create an hour-long silent film about a clarinet-playing insect, using — in Kid Koala’s case — three turntables, vibraphone, piano, keyboards, a string trio, 20 miniature sets, 15 performers, and multiple puppets.
Oh, and he and his team performs live, with the film projected onscreen, all in one take.
But this is the razor-thin tightrope the Montreal DJ has chosen to walk, and now the Bay Area can bear witness when “The Storyville Mosquito,” Kid Koala’s latest builtfrom-scratch multimedia extravaganza, comes to SFJazz Center from Friday through Sunday.
“I like the danger of it all,” Kid Koala, whose real name is Eric San, said during a virtual call with The Chronicle. “I’m balancing the whole show on three turntable needles. It’s just a really, really expanded version of DJ battling. And when we’re in the zone there’s absolutely nothing like it.”
“The Storyville Mosquito” tells the tale of an insect musician trying to join an orchestra in the big city and the conflicts it encounters along the way, like a vibraphone-playing tarantula. Puppeteers control the movements of the insect puppets — based on Kid Koala’s illustrations — across miniature sets, and full-size DSLR cameras project the action onscreen in silent film form. Kid Koala and the string trio provide the live sound
track accompaniment.
Kid Koala said he has had a fascination with puppetry and silent storytelling for years. His interest was piqued by watching “Of Muppets and Men” at age 7 and “The World of Jim Henson” documentary as an adult, in which he was blown away by how they made the Muppets ride bicycles around Central Park. Another key moment was watching Charlie Chaplin’s silent film classic “Modern Times” as a child. He recalls his grandparents, parents and sister sprawled on the living room floor, enjoying the comedy but also taking in the film’s romance and political message.
“As I grew up, I saw the layers in operation, and this show will touch those same heartstrings and funny bones,” he said. “It’s a goalpost of mine to create something that would entertain a multigenerational audience.” (“The Storyville Mosquito” matinees this weekend are appropriately kid-friendly.)
The show’s director of photography, AJ Korkidakis, has collaborated with Kid Koala for more than a decade. And Korkidakis has a hand in a lot, from staging how the production will look onscreen to managing the workflow on the night of the show. There’s tight choreography with different crew members — from camera operators to puppeteers to musicians — that involves precise movements and timing. It’s a production that Kid Koala compares to “15 people on a surfboard.” Korkidakis concurs. “There’s not one person everyone is following. We’re all constantly in sync with each other,” he said. “We’re not looking at the front of the surfboard to figure out where we’re going. Everyone develops an intuition with each other, and moves together in a unified way.”
The show travels with a crew of 15 musicians, puppeteers, cinematographers, sound tech, live video editor and stage manager. It takes about six hours to set up and two hours to tear down. Behind the turntables, Kid Koala eschews technological advances like digital DJ software, where all the music is stored in a hard drive. Instead, he uses good ol’ vinyl, even investing in a record cutter, which allows him to create his own personalized slices of customized sound for the show.
His background as a performing DJ allows him to physically control the show’s flow and improvise or extend scenes on the fly. “If the audience is laughing hard, we can’t cut out of that,” he said. “We let the scene do what it has to do and then move on. So it is very fluid that way. It’s definitely like a scratch DJ; you gotta stay on your toes.”
DJing is an integral part of his foundation. Since the mid-’90s, Kid Koala has built his DJ style on blending whimsical sounds. His 1996 cassette mixtape “Scratchcratchratchatch” famously transposed Charlie Brown’s lowly “I got a rock” lament from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” into the boisterous flex, “I gotta rock!” His “Moon River” routine, a tribute to his mom’s favorite song, can extract tears.
He’s released consistently entertaining and adventurous albums since and was recruited for turntable duties in both Deltron 3030 and Gorillaz. (Yup, those are Kid Koala’s scratches on Gorillaz’s biggest hit, “Clint Eastwood.”)
Meanwhile, this DJpuppetry-silent film crossover has humble beginnings. Based on his graphic novel, his first stage production, “Nufonia Must Fall,” played at Mission District restaurant Butterfly in 2003. Images from the novel about a robot who wanted to write a love song were projected on a screen, as Kid Koala, DJ P-Love and DJ Jester created the soundtrack live.
Other multimedia productions he’s created since include the riotous “Vinyl Vaudeville” revue, the ambient creative space “Music to Draw To,” and the interactive “Satellite Turntable Orchestra. In 2017 and 201819, “Nufonia” returned to San Francisco, fully built out with puppets and silent film projection, at SFJazz Center’s Robert N. Miner Auditorium. With “The Storyville Mosquito,” which will take over that same auditorium this weekend, he’s created a unique lane and identity for himself that’s constantly evolving, never boring, embedded with kid-like wonder.
“These productions are close to my heart,” he said. “It’s all my favorite universes colliding on stage: film, soundtrack music, scratching, puppetry, animation. I love all that magic and I’m trying to contribute to it.”