TV / Film News

Jazz It Up! New Episode: Lewis Nash Quintet, the Caribbean Jazz Project, Stanley Jordan's Guitar Technique, Vintage Nina Simone, Chuck Stewart's Photography, and Duke Ellington News

Source: All About Jazz
April 11, 2009

New York, NY – Drummer Lewis Nash blazes his quintet with percussive drive and the Caribbean Jazz Project with vibraphonist Dave Samuels brings spicy swing to the headline features for episode 5 of the second season of Jazz it Up! In exclusive interviews (heard during the second of two songs featured by each) Samuels tells host Greg Thomas the origins of his Grammy award-winning group and discusses the recording “Afro Bop Alliance,” and Nash describes his musical vision as a ...

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Paris' Quai Branly Museum Celebrates 'Jazz Century'

Source: Michael Ricci
April 6, 2009

In one image displayed at the exhibit, 57 jazz artists gather on a stoop in Harlem in 1958. Dizzy Gillespie sticks out his tongue at Roy Elridge, and Count Basie sits next to a row of neighborhood boys.

The museum traces jazz from its roots to its appearance in myriad art forms, even in a Three Little Pigs takeoff: The Three Little Bops.

The Quai Branly Museum, a steel-and-glass palace on the Seine River, has news for the culture world: ...

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Soloist Downtown Street Musician Inspires Times Columnist

Source: Michael Ricci
April 4, 2009

When I met a street musician in downtown Los Angeles nearly four years ago, a guy playing a violin that was missing two strings, I wasn't sure I'd ever write about him.

But as I got to know more about this gent, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, one column led to another, and then to a book called The Soloist, and then to a movie in which Robert Downey Jr. plays yours truly.

Downey and I spent some time together in 2007 ...

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Library of Congress Jazz Film Series

Source: All About Jazz
March 30, 2009

FILM SERIES Jazz in the Spring at the Nations Library

Jazz Film Series curated by Larry Appelbaum, Music Division, Library of Congress.

Wednesday evenings at 7:00 pm in the Mary Pickford Theater, 3rd Floor, James Madison Building. All programs are free (no tickets required), but seating is limited to 60 seats. Reservations may be made one week before any given screening by calling (202-707-5677) between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. Reserved seats must be claimed at least 10 ...

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Bound for Hell, or Glory, at the Cinematheque

Source: All About Jazz
March 29, 2009

Not since I saw Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner go at each other in an excellent production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and the audience the other night following an American Cinematheque screening.

I keep alluding to what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night this was, and I've gotten asked to go into ...

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Woody Guthrie's Music Inspires Americas Dust Bowl Era Desperation

Source: All About Jazz
March 29, 2009

Hal Ashby's film of Woody Guthrie's autobiography, BOUND FOR GLORY, recounts the protest singer's life starting when he's a young man with a wife and two children, trying to find work as a sign painter in the Dust Bowl-ravaged Texas of the 1930s.

He leaves his wife, Mary (Melinda Dillon), with her family and, like thousands of others, rides the rails to California. Along the way he sees the brutal treatment of men by the railroad's hired thugs before being ...

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BIRD Captures Charlie Parker

Source: All About Jazz
March 28, 2009

I've seen two documentaries about Charlie Parker recently, but I haven't seen a lot of Parker. In an age when archives are filled with newsreel footage and videotape on even the most obscure of public figures, Parker seems always to have been somewhere else when the cameras were on.

There is a shot of him accepting a Downbeat Award at a banquet, where the master of ceremonies solemnly informs him that jazz is color blind (if so, then why the ...

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The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon

Source: Michael Ricci
March 27, 2009

The unheralded trumpeter makes a compelling centerpiece for the documentary. Music elite and bebop fans widely consider him the greatest living jazz trumpeter.

Though commonly recognized by many from his longtime stint as Merv Griffin's comedic sidekick on The Merv Griffin Show, trumpeter and vocalist Jack Sheldon qualifies, hands-down, as a force of jazz and one of the most unique talents in his chosen genre.

Fewer still may realize, however, that off-camera Sheldon battled his way through one of the ...

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