Here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve often fea­tured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poet­ry read­er, favored David Let­ter­man guest. More rarely, we’ve post­ed mate­r­i­al ded­i­cat­ed to show­cas­ing him prac­tic­ing his pri­ma­ry craft, writ­ing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits con­cert does sur­face here, pre­pare to set­tle in for an unre­lent­ing­ly (and enter­tain­ing­ly) askew musi­cal expe­ri­ence. In March, we post­ed Bur­ma Shave, an hour-long per­for­mance from the late sev­en­ties in which Waits took on “the per­sona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-for­ward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde com­pos­er Har­ry Partch, Howl­in’ Wolf, Frank Sina­tra, Astor Piaz­zol­la, Irish tenor John McCor­ma­ck, Kurt Weill, Louis Pri­ma, Mex­i­can norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evoca­tive quote comes from Big Time’s own press notes, as excerpt­ed by Dan­ger­ous Minds, which calls the view­ing expe­ri­ence “like enter­ing a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”

Watch the 90-minute con­cert film in its entire­ty, though, and you may not find it evoca­tive enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the expe­ri­ence of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a com­bi­na­tion of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, play­ing accor­dion — but with­out the wis­dom they pos­sessed.” The year before, the singer actu­al­ly wrote and pro­duced a stage play built around the char­ac­ter, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North Amer­i­ca and Europe made thor­ough use of Waits’ the­atri­cal bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Fran­cis­co’s Warfield The­atre and Los Ange­les’ Wiltern The­atre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stock­holm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time’s mate­r­i­al. As for its sen­si­bil­i­ty, well, even Waits fans may feel inse­cure, and hap­pi­ly so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find some­thing famil­iar indeed in this show’s ren­di­tion of “Way Down in the Hole.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits, Play­ing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Clas­sic 1978 TV Per­for­mance

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits and David Let­ter­man: An Amer­i­can Tele­vi­sion Tra­di­tion

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In the acclaimed 1986 film Round Mid­night, the great tenor sax­o­phon­ist Dex­ter Gor­don plays an aging Amer­i­can jazzman liv­ing in Paris in the late 1950s, strug­gling to con­trol his addic­tion to alco­hol so he can keep play­ing every night at the Blue Note in Saint-Ger­main-des-Prés.

The role came nat­u­ral­ly to Gor­don, whose own strug­gle with hero­in addic­tion in the 1950s result­ed in prison time and a loss of his New York City cabaret card. Unable to play in the clubs of New York, Gor­don moved to Europe in the ear­ly 1960s and stayed there for 14 years. But while Dale Turn­er, his char­ac­ter in Round Mid­night, is a worn-down man near­ing death, Gor­don’s Euro­pean exile was a peri­od of rebirth.

By the time the French film direc­tor and jazz enthu­si­ast Bertrand Tav­ernier tracked Gor­don down in 1984, though, the sax­o­phone play­er had been back in Amer­i­ca for a decade and was, after 40 years on the jazz cir­cuit, becom­ing a bit worn down him­self. The Dale Turn­er char­ac­ter is based part­ly on tenor sax­o­phon­ist Lester Young, who was Gor­don’s friend and men­tor and a major influ­ence in his life, and part­ly on pianist Bud Pow­ell, whom Gor­don knew and worked with in Paris. Tav­ernier was look­ing for authen­tic­i­ty and he found it in Gor­don, a man with a direct link to the gold­en age of bebop. As the film­mak­er told Peo­ple in 1986, “I could not think of any­one else doing the part.”

Round Mid­night was a crit­i­cal suc­cess. Gor­don received an Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion for best actor in a lead­ing role. The film was not­ed for “its love­ly, ele­giac pac­ing and its tremen­dous depth of feel­ing” by Janet Maslin of the New York Times. “No actor could do what the great jazz sax­o­phon­ist Dex­ter Gor­don does in ‘Round Mid­night,’ ” writes Maslin, who describes Gor­don’s screen pres­ence as the very embod­i­ment of the music itself. “It’s in his heavy-lid­ded eyes, in his hoarse, smoky voice, in the way his long, grace­ful fin­gers seem to be play­ing silent accom­pa­ni­ment to his con­ver­sa­tion. It’s even in the way he habit­u­al­ly calls any­one or any­thing ‘Lady,’ as in ‘Well, Lady Sweets, are you ready for tonight?’ ”

Those are the words Turn­er address­es to his sax­o­phone at the begin­ning of the scene above. The film then cuts to the Blue Note, where the musi­cian’s young admir­er Fran­cis (played by François Cluzet) is trans­fixed as the old man gives a melan­choly, world-weary per­for­mance of the John­ny Green stan­dard “Body and Soul.” Like all of the music in the film, “Body and Soul” was record­ed live on the set. Gor­don is accom­pa­nied by Her­bie Han­cock on piano, John McLaugh­lin on gui­tar, Pierre Mich­e­lot on bass and Bil­ly Hig­gins on drums.

For more on Dex­ter Gor­don, includ­ing a film clip from a vin­tage per­for­mance at a Dutch night­club, see our ear­li­er arti­cle “Dex­ter Gor­don’s Ele­gant Ver­sion of the Jazz Stan­dard ‘What’s New,’ 1964.”