Home » Jazz News
TV / Film News
Timely announcements covering new album releases, tours, concert series, special events, job postings, crowdfunding campaigns and more. You can find more news by searching our website, viewing our news stream, seeing what's trending or reading our blog posts. Subscribe to our news RSS feed and/or embed AAJ news content on your website or blog. Learn about our news service here. Submit news here.
Jazz Documentary: Killer B3 (2013)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Today marks the start of the third annual JazzWax Film Festival. Each December, between the holidays, I switch from music to film and hopefully introduce you to films you haven's seen in some time or have never viewed before. For my opener, I'm screening Killer B3, a fabulous 2013 documentary on the Hammond B3 organ directed, produced and written by Murv Seymour. The documentary was filmed between 2005 and 2013 and received funding independent of Hammond Suzuki USA. Murv has ...
Continue Reading
BBC Documentary on Chess Records
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In my new Rock Concert book, I interviewed Marshal Chess, son of Leonard Chess, who co-founded the fabled Chess label with his brother Phil. As readers of my book know, Marshal goes into great detail on the label's founding and how Chess artists such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley came to invent rock 'n' roll in 1955. Here's a BBC documentary on Chess Records and the vital role it played in the early R&B and rock 'n' roll revolution... ...
Continue Reading
Anatomy of Pop: The Music Explosion
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Just over a week ago, Anatomy of Pop: The Music Explosion was uploaded to YouTube. The rare 1966 documentary was directed by Jonathan Donald and Stephen Fleischman, and written by Fleischman, and aired on ABC TV. There are appearances by Tony Bennett, the Carter Family, Skeeter Davis, Duke Ellington, the Temptations, Bill Monroe, Cousin Brucie, Berry Gordy, the Supremes, Peter Paul & Mary, Tex Ritter, Billy Taylor and more. The footage is extraordinary, though the language is archaic in places. ...
Continue Reading
Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae Music
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
You're in for a pre-Thanksgiving treat. Yesterday, I posted on a 1964 Jamaican mini documentary on ska, the island's dominant dance music of the early 1960s. Today. I found a high-resolution print of Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae Music (2009). It followed ska by slowing ska down and adding a soulful groove in the mid-1960s, setting the stage for reggae's political-themed emergence in the early 1970s. I love rocksteady. It's soft, gentle and hypnotic. And I love rocksteady covers of ...
Continue Reading
Documentary: This Is Ska
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In Jamaica, before reggae and rocksteady, there was ska. Emerging in the late 1950s, ska was a combination of calypso, American jazz and R&B. Ska evolved as Jamaican singers and musicians put their own spin on the sound of American pop records that were played on large sound systems built for neighborhood parties. As ska grew in popularity, it developed its own rhythms, horn riffs, dance style and independent record labels. By the early 1960s, the ska sound made its ...
Continue Reading
Documentary: Dame Shirley Bassey
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Most Americans know Shirley Bassey only from her three brassy James Bond film themes—Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker. In the U.K., Dame Shirley was enormously popular from the late 1950s on. She delivered on stage the way Judy Garland did, belted songs out the way Barbra Streisand did and was as coy and as intriguing as Nancy Wilson. Yet she never crossed over to the U.S. pop market. While she appeared occasionally in Las Vegas and on American TV ...
Continue Reading
Documentary: Sonny Greenwich
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Canadian guitarist Sonny Greenwich is still with us. He has performed with musicians such as Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, John Handy and Sun Ra. So I was excited when I received the following last week from Matt LeGroulx in Montreal: Hi Marc. First, thank you and Brigitte Berman for making the Bix documentary available to your readers. What a great film. Second, I just came across “It Ain't All Jazz," a documentary about guitarist ...
Continue Reading
