Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

Emotional biography of the late composer, cellist and disco pioneer Arthur Russell, a largely forgotten pillar of the New York avant-garde of the 1970s and '80s.

Synopsis
This emotional biography of an obscure composer, cellist and disco pioneer -felled by AIDS in 1992 is also a sketch of New York's vanished "downtown" scene. An acne-scarred gay kid from Iowa with the heart of a New Yorker, Arthur Russell was a walking contradiction - eccentric and reserved, loving and unfaithful, ambitious but self-defeating, a genius and a loser. Mixing jazz, rock, classical, minimalism and funk, he was obsessed with making music but not with finishing it. Director Wolf combines archival footage and interviews with Russell associates like Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg to produce an engrossing study of a complex personality and rescue a lost musical legacy.