Movies: Jazz

Saxophonist Art Pepper (1925-1982) lived the kind of jazz life only found in Hollywood movies. His prodigious talent led him to top gigs as a teenager, but drugs and attendant criminal activity knocked him out of commission for virtually all of the 1...

In a wordless story with semi-surreal stage sets, a poor black man ventures from his ramshackle rural home to the big city, where a dancing girl in a dive two-times him. He returns to his home and wife's arms....

...

Record label manager and producer Manfred Eicher established the record label ECM in 1969. He has been a key promoter of European - and Norwegian - jazz....

In a bland, utilitarian world of order, one worker finds his inner jazz...

A music documentary made with Sun Ra....

The multi-award-winning Finnish documentarian Mika Kaurismäki, brother of Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past), helms the nonfiction work Sonic Mirror -- a protracted exploration of rhythm as one of life's driving forces. Revered drummer Billy Cob...

...

In 1999, on the occasion of the centenary of Ellington's birth, Franco Maresco commissioned Steve Lacy to perform ten songs by the Duke, which were recorded and filmed in Palermo. In 2024, twenty years after Lacy's death and fifty years after that of...

A jazzy film in which the spectator is forced to look with the ears and listen with the eyes. An abstract film drawn directly on the computer....

The film is made up of one single take. The camera pans to the left, focusing on a dilapidated fence in a rural field, as Ella Fitzgerald's "All My Life" plays on the soundtrack. At the end of the 3 minute film, the camera tilts up to the blue sky ju...

Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and company in concert in Paris, 1984. Documents performances and rehearsals in Paris, France, 1984. It includes the compositions "Love in Outer Space," "Nuclear War," and "1984" by Sun Ra and the standards "Tea for Two" and "Blu...

An evil spider kidnaps a housefly from a cabaret and takes her to his secret lab....

...

Tracklist DVD: 1. Love For Sale (instr.) 2. Come Fly With Me 3. Luck Be A Lady 4. Pennies From Heaven 5. Witchcraft 6. It Had To Be You 7. The Best Is Yet To Come 8. I Concentrate On You 9. Wee (instr.) 10. The Lady Is A Tramp 11. Please B...

A documentary about the weeks leading up to the early death of jazz legend Eric Dolphy. Centered around his last month alive and the titular record done in Holland with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink, the documentary traces his LA roots up through ...

Max Roach and his double quartet live from Stuttgart, West Germany in 1990....

A portrait of Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund....

A 1975 documentary on the great Blues pianist Earl Hines, one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano....

Hard Rock classics turned into jazz - or even the creators of many Black Sabbath songs? Jazz Sabbath is damn well thought out and yet very true. Live performance of the band from November 11, 2022 as part of the 43rd Leverkusen Jazz Days....