Jazz Docs/Films: S/D

Round Midnight (1986) fictionalized take on Bud Powell-esque expatriate in Paris, worth seeing for Dexter Gordon in lead role.

Also I've seen Bird, which I couldn't say was great.

I love the Johnny Staccatto series - is that available on DVD?
(staggers over to IMDb it)
Er...no...
Damn useful contribution from me here!

Ha according to IMDb if you enjoy Jazz on a Summers Day they recommend

Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins

...not a jazz film though.

not a "jazz film" per se, but conrad rooks' chappaqua might belong on this list (if you like you can turn down the ravi shankar music and play ornette coleman's chappaqua suite over it).

The Connection is also a great non-documentary jazz film.

Seconded.

Saw Jazz on a Summer's Day for the first time tonight. I didn't love every last bit of music, but the film itself is pretty great--for the performances I did love (Jimmy Giuffre, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson's first two songs), and as a document. Berry in particular seemed like a moment to me--maybe not Dylan at Newport, but he just seemed like this force from another world (even if they were careful to jazz him up with a clarinet). When Chico Hamilton followed with some excruciatingly arty flute-driven thing, with a close-up of a heavily jeweled white woman concentrating intently, I found the contrast stunning. Anyone who found racial subtexts in Miley Cyrus last month would have a field day with this film.

Had never heard of this before, but I saw this last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8fdYdYm4Io

Search: Rising Tones Cross, excellent doc about free jazz musicians making their way in early '80s New York. Includes Dotn Cherry, William Parker, Peter Brötzmann and loads more.

There used to be some really great jazz videos in the ILAC centre library in Dublin when I was living over there in the early to mid 90s. Can't remember names offhand other than the Coltrane Legacy which I think was exploring the next wave of somewhat avant jazz players including Woody Shaw playing a conch shell.
Wish I could remember the rest but it was getting on for 20 years ago, You just used to be able to get them to put on a film and watch it with headphones, not sure if anybody ever got into having to pick up a pair of headphones to tune into what I was watching on the occasions I got one set up. Tended to pick the quieter times anyway.

Channel 4 had some very interesting jazz docs in its early days. They reshowed the '68 film of Charles Mingus trying to set up a music school in his apartment on Great Jones St in Greenwich Village. That was the house next to where Mark C used to live so I'd been next door to it.
Was that Triumph of the Underdog or is that something else. I think I have it around somewhere.
There was a really good one on Fats Waller that might have come form the same series. I still have about 3/4s of it on a disc somewhere but unfortunately don't have a great amount of organisation of discs.

Oh and there's a great fly-on-the-wall doc on Ken Vandermark, Musician.

For some reason Peter Brötzmann had not one but two docs made about him in the space of a year. Unfortunately neither of them were that good.

I found the entire Jazz on a Summer's Day on YouTube last night, but it's mysteriously gone today (or else I can't access it at work). Here's the Chuck Berry clip, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHfdJyOb5qY&list=PL941234B8AC8FC8E7

whole thing seems to still be here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSkiK6iRtoo

Thanks, that's what I found last night--don't know why it doesn't turn up on a title search for me.

Love the fact that Jo Jones is playing with Chuck.

Didn't realize that was him (I know the name), but I was really focussed on the drummer last night--seemed to be having a great old time.

Imagine The Sound is probably the best documentary on the new music. Features Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and Archie Shepp, interviews and performances (all separately, as had been a few fallings-out among them).

apparently this is p good...?

https://www.netflix.com/title/80147988

i thought so, caveat emptor

curious if there's much (or any) live footage of him performing

some in this, mostly from TV iirc

It has received mostly rave reviews, and I'm dying to see it.

there's a fair amount of live footage (primarily with the jazz messengers). doc was really well done, I thought.

it was great. lots of beautiful photos & interesting clips. A nice evocation of the Blue Note's classic period... and everyone they talked to was relevant to the story - that is, no Santanas were used in the making of this film.

lol

i guess there's pretty much nothing but santanas in that new coltrane doc? including santana.

ugh

I mean local hero/respect knuckles and all that but I really don't care about his thoughts about Coltrane

i relistened to that Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone radio doc last week and it hold up really well — maybe a little bit too much poetry reading, but a lot of good interviews/discussions/info/music.

is Bill Clinton a Santana, cuz i think he's in there

in the Lee Morgan doc or the Coltrane one

fuck no, in that Coltrane travesty!

no Wanksanta in the Lee Morgan doc.

Wayne Shorter was great in the Morgan doc — might just watch a long uncut interview of him.

For those like me who don't have Netflix, I Called Him Morgan is also streaming via Amazon Video. I haven't seen it yet but I want to.

Been dying to see the Lee Morgan doc, didn't know it was streaming.

Once again will recommend the Lewis Porter book about Coltrane, which is a deep and serious look at the man and his art, and not some fame-based celebrity folderol.

Shorter in the Morgan doc was wonderful- the moment where he's looking at the pics of he & Morgan together, reliving what was going through his mind as he saw Morgan slip further and further away... very moving.

this was great - well edited, good interviews, nicely shot, no bullshit animation or poorly chosen commentators

I've tried a few times to read that Porter book but I found his prose very dull. I guess I'll give it another go. The Birth of Bebop defeated me, so I need a new book, and I'm very much interested in a proper book on Trane.

xposts

I haven't actually read it from beginning to end, just read around it. Dipped into it just now and there was plenty of good historical stuff from such notables as Benny Powell and yes, Jimmy Heath, a ton of historical as well as technical stuff from Jimmy Heath. Worth reading for the discussion of Modal Jazz alone.

John Gilmore(!) w Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (incl Lee Morgan): http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=-jpaXmrX-Y0

Here's the full performance, close to 40 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE1-MFXmjJY

Saw the Lee Morgan doc last night — excellent.

Has anyone seen this one? Looks intriguing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EheTr-wyLPg

trying Ken Burn's Jazz again
honest to god could anyone speak besides Wynton Marsalis?

i actually like a lot of what he contributes but his habit of talking about people from like 1912 like he knew them or something "Now, Jellyroll Morton told his grammamma he was a night watchman" stuff like that is sooo annoying

Jazz Bono

the worst. I hate that doc

i mean it's cool to see all the photos and watch the old film and hear the recordings in sequence

also, jazz scholars talking about sexy stuff is not cool

yeah, there's plenty of good footage and photos. but it is pretty painful thanks to Wynton.

Too many problems to list with Mr. Burns' Jazz, but they engaged in some serious revisionist history with Miles going electric. Wynton (and George Wein) made it sound like Miles went to Newport in 1969, saw Sly getting the kids dancing, and decided then and there to go electric.

Except, by then, Miles had already gone electric. In A Silent Way had been completed months earlier, and his 1969 Newport set featured material that would later come out on Bitches Brew. Wynton deliberately fucked with the chronology in order to make Miles' move to electric instrumentation seem like an impulsive cash-in.

and Hancock, Corea and Carter had already started moving to electric instruments even earlier on Filles de Kilimanjaro

Mtume is good in this when he gets going on the acoustic vs. electric thing (around the 4 minute mark)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OLqid9RABs

Yeah, that's a good clip, and it's cool that Mtume mentioned Sun Ra. That film (Miles Electric) is probably the best Miles doc out there, despite its limited scope. It's interesting to see Gary Bartz and Herbie Hancock talking about their initial dismissal of electric instrumentation, and how they came around to it.

Herbie interviews are so great in that

Wynton Marsalis & Santana clearly have the same agent

i'm grateful for any music doc lacking Thurston Moore

what music docs has he shown up in (besides the Year Punk Broke)?

a bunch 10-20 years ago... the Brian Wilson one

and some more recently!

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601952/?ref_=nv_sr_1#self

speaking of ol' thurston, this doc (not strictly jazz) is great:

http://ubu.com/film/atlas_blood.html

Put Blood in the Music is a unique documentary on the downtown New York music scene. In a collage of music, performance and commentary, Atlas captures the energy and pluralism that characterize this urban milieu. Reflecting the eclecticism of his subject, Atlas re-structures the conventional "talking head" format to allow a fragmented, fast-paced compendium of voices and sounds, ranging from music critic John Rockwell of The New York Times to street musicians. Focusing on such influential downtown figures as John Zorn, and featuring performances by Zorn, Sonic Youth, Hugo Largo and others, this is less a documentary than a cultural document, a vivid time capsule of the contemporary New York music scene.

I saw that about 30 years ago on PBS.

I saw that on the South bank Show when I was young. People on ILM say: Zorn releases 50 albums a year and they are all the same, or something similar. But Spillane is still an absolute classic, and blew my 15 y.o. mind at the time.

Finally got to the Lee Morgan doc, been listening to LM records all day.

I remembered hearing that Art Blakey was a lifelong functional heroin addict, and there are some stories out there about how he'd introduce young musicians to it (by example if nothing else?), and sometimes pay them in drugs, but fire them when it affected their ability to be in the band. That's so fucked up. Even if it wasn't malicious, it's just unfortunate considering that his whole thing was hiring the youngest new talent.

always been baffled by junkie drummers tbh, esp incredible ones like Blakey and Topper Headon, just how did they do it.

I once asked Dave Mustaine how he could play songs as fast as Megadeth's late '80s/early '90s work while being smacked out of his mind; he told me a lot of it was muscle memory.

xxp yeah, that is what is said about blakey:

Blakey taught Morgan how to control an audience, to carry them from climax to climax, leaving them exhausted and begging for more. He also taught him to love heroin. A lifelong addict, Blakey was notorious for introducing his young bandmates to the drug, and dropping them when it began to affect their performance. Perchard writes that when Morgan and the young pianist Bobby Timmons joined his band, Blakey told them, “I’ll have you guys turned on in two weeks.” He kept his word.

“Art Blakey was famous for this,” said an anonymous musician quoted in Perchard’s book. “That’s the way he paid a lot of the guys off. In other words, he gave them drugs, and when it was time to get paid, he took the money.”

“It was a really bad addiction for him,” Kiko Yamamoto, a model and dancer whom Morgan married after a two-week courtship in Chicago, told Jeffery S. McMillan, author of “Delightfulee.” He brought Yamamoto home with him, first to New York, and then — after his escalating habit forced him to leave the Messengers — to his parents’ house in Philadelphia. Once it became clear that he had no interest in anything but heroin, she left for good.

“Some people, like Art for instance…Art always controlled it, you know,” Yamamoto told McMillan. “It never really took over his life. Art was able to work and do whatever else he had to do. Lee wasn’t like that. He was not a functioning drug addict. At first, yes, but as he got more involved with it, it just became impossible.”

wtf did I miss something or is Yamamoto not even mentioned in "I Called Him Morgan"? weird.

unrelated: was glad to see a snippet of a Val Wilmer interview in there

yeah, she's not brought up, as far as i can remember
it's definitely interesting — i feel like more often than not, musicians who played with Blakey talk about him in glowing terms (but maybe that's just what I've read)

I think they glossed over a lot to focus on the Lee/Helen story (which seems fair, it's only an hour and a half)

xp

Is there another thread for fiction films with proper jazz in them or should we use this one, I wonder.

I guess this one.

Or you can start a new one

Will ponder

How’s the pondering going?

On that note, I'd like to recommend All Night Long (Basil Dearden, 1962), a loose retelling of Othello set at an all-night party for the early 60s UK jazz set and starring Patrick McGoohan as a drummer haplessly attempting to manipulate everyone around him. Mingus and Brubeck in (small) acting roles! Tubby Hayes and John Dankworth put in appearances too. The whole thing is a little overwrought but then so was Shakespeare. I found it in full on YT, not sure if the upload is viewable outside the US.

wait so McGoohan’s character is like Iago, but not successful at it?

Well it's a very loose reworking, with more drum solos

ok i want to check this out

Post it over here: Launder and Gilliat, the Boultings etc.