Gerald Watson and DJ 2-Tone Jones, better known as their prolific stage moniker, Shaolin Jazz, are returning for more thrilling kung fu entertainment with this year’s seventh installment of Can I Kick It? in Wilmington, North Carolina next month.
The hip-hop duo will be on hand to apply their own ambient score for audiences, this time for a screening of action legend Bruce Lee’s 1973 classic, Enter The Dragon. The screening is presented in collaboration between the North Carolina Black Film Festival, Speller Street Films, and Black Kung Fu Cinema.
Shaolin Jazz has been in business since 2013 with the Can I Kick It? series, catering to the lovers of martial arts flicks, music, and everything else in between, coining it as “a martial arts film series with a mixtape twist.” With Jones at the turntable for next month, fans will get to live scene-by-scene score fusing elements of Funk, Soul, Hip- Hop, Rock, and more, in addition to “an array of techniques and sound bites to accentuate different moments in the film, ranging from aggressive fight scenes to subtle love scenes.”
Check out a sample below:
“This isn’t just playing a DJ set during a movie. We incorporate the music with the movie so you can still follow the plot and hear the dialogue”, said Jones. “You might have one scene using a song with lyrics and another using instrumental beds underneath. It’s weaving music over and under the film audio, just scoring the film, scene by scene.”
With a screen career dating back to the 1940s and a wave of stardom that would surface in the wake of his notoriety as “Kato” in TV series “The Green Hornet”, Lee was able to churn out a trio of Hong Kong hit martial arts films – The Big Boss, Fists Of Fury and The Way of The Dragon – that would herald the coming of an Asian leading man in cinema, the likes of which the world had never seen in entertainment. That momentum became just the powder keg Lee needed in lieu of the prospective Enter The Dragon, releasing in 1973 from Warner Bros. Pictures and marking Lee’s banner success story with a Hollywood studio.
Joined by fellow screen stars Jim Kelly, John Saxon, Betty Chung, Ahna Capri and Shih Kien, and featuring appearances by martial arts stars Angela Mao Ying, Bob Wall and Bolo Yeung, Robert Clouse directed the film from a script by Michael Allin. In the film, Lee plays a martial artist persuaded by British Intelligence to infiltrate a remote island – home to a deadly martial arts tournament where he ultimately gets to confront the man who killed his sister, and opportunely take down the ringleader of a drug trafficking and prostitution ring.
The film continues to be a staple for martial arts fans to this very day as Lee’s last completed film, released posthumously nearly a month after Lee’s untimely death on July 20, 1973, and since preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Kien, whose extensive career also saw him collaborate with the likes of Jackie Chan, Wong Jing and Sammo Hung to name a few, died in June 2009; Capri, who played love interest to Saxon’s character in the film as well as one of the island’s minions, passed in August 2010; Kelly, whose credits would extend with titles like Clouse’s Black Belt Jones, Gordon Parks Jr.’s Three The Hard Way and Fred Williamson’s Three Down, Two To Go to name a few, passed away in June 2013; Saxon, also known for roles in Bob Clark’s Black Christmas and in the inaugural 1984 Freddy Krueger slasher, A Nightmare On Elm Street, passed in July 2020; Wall, an accomplished martial artist, author, and actor who can also be seen in Lee’s The Way Of The Dragon and in the posthumously-completed Game Of Death and briefly in the Michael Jai White-led Blood And Bone, passed away back in January at the age of 82.
In-person festivities kick off on Saturday, October 15, at Jengo’s Playhouse at 6:00 pm, where attendees will get to pregame with a special set by DJ Bigg B of Coast 97.3FM at 5:00 pm, followed by a karate demonstration by local martial artist Sensei David Ward of the Seiran Dojo at 5:50 pm, and the screening of Enter The Dragon at 6:00 pm. Food services will be provided by On Thyme Catering from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm with an Afro-Asian inspired cuisine, with bar and concessions also open at Jengo’s Playhouse.
Tickets are now on sale at Eventbrite, with more to be sold at the door on the day of the event if available.
This year’s Can I Kick It? is sponsored by Dawson Med, nCino and Cucalorus Film Festival.