Movies: Jazz singer or musician

Young Cab Calloway's mother is concerned, because Cab spends his days listening to the radio, pretending to lead a miniature orchestra. A deacon passing by the apartment hears him singing and advises him go to his wife's gypsy tea room. As she reads ...

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Chet Baker plows a uniquely individual furrow in the field of jazz. His trumpet playing is beautifully delicate and takes standard ballads into hitherto unexplored emotional territories. Here Chet is accompanied by Michel Grailler on piano and Riccar...

Alvin Queen is one of the best jazz drummers of all time. A child prodigy, he played with the greatest masters (Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Pharaoh Sanders... ) He is also a very nice person who has a lot of wisdom to transmit. ...

Guy Nadon is the rhythm incarnate. A jazz drummer who strikes on everything that makes noise. A king of musical improvisation, but also a king of improvisation, sometimes holding words bordering on surrealism....

The documentary recounts the six-decade career of jazz singer Carol Sloane, lauded by critics and peers as one of the greatest jazz singers in history but still relatively unknown to the public at large, and follows her preparations for her final liv...

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Common sense says you can't make a living in America playing avant-garde improvisational jazz. But Ken Vandermark does it anyway. Among musicians, Vandermark's work ethic is almost mythic. The Chicago reed player has released over 100 albums with ne...

Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology....

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With this project Pat Metheny has created a whole new way to make music. Based on a childhood fascination with his grandfather's player piano, Metheny commissioned new inventors to build an exciting array of acoustic mechanical musical instruments ca...

Madrid, Spain, June 30th, 2016. Rafael and José Luis jam a crazy one-day trip in search of the city's jazz scene, meeting the musicians, the club owners, the audience, the true believers who tell the story from the beginning, back in the 1950s, until...

Jamie Cullum's live concert from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, along with tour footage and interviews taken from his travels in the U.S., and footage from his performance at the Glastonbury Festival in the U.K....

Django Reinhardt's music still looms as the standard to be attained some 50 years after his death....

Documentary film about the life and mysterious death of forgotten jazz arranger/composer Gary McFarland....

In King for Two Days, filmmaker Noah Hutton chronicles drummer Dave King's (The Bad Plus, Happy Apple) two-night concert at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, featuring five of the groups he drums in. Through rehearsals, interviews with the mu...

Documenting Louis Armstrong's appearance at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival....

Shot in New York, Cape Town, St Helena and the Atlantic Ocean, Sathima's Windsong, is a lyrical portrait of South African jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. In her Chelsea Hotel apartment, home for over thirty years, she patches together her journeys...

The hits come fast and furious in this 2001 performance by Antoine "Fats" Domino at the Jazz and Heritage Festival in his hometown of New Orleans. Well, maybe not that fast; Fats's style was never what you'd call exactly frenetic, and he was well int...

Documentary exploring the meaning and history of cool through the American music that started in the 1940s in the bars of New York and LA, and became known as cool jazz....