Film Review
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Lynyrd Skynyrd: Live At Knebworth '76
by Doug Collette
Lynyrd Skynyrd Live At Knebworth Eagle Rock Entertainment 2021 By the time Lynyrd Skynyrd appeared at the Knebworth Festival in England on August 21. 1976, the group had risen to an estimable plateau of popularity. But, in keeping with the band's increasingly tumultuous history, it had also plummeted somewhat from the commercial pinnacle of its sophomore album Second Helping (MCA, 1974) and, in the midst of a grueling tour schedule to support the subsequent albums ...
read moreBuster Williams: Bass to Infinity
by Victor L. Schermer
Buster Williams: Bass to Infinity Director: Adam Kahan Distributor or Film Company USA: 90 minutes Premier Date: Nov. 12, 2019 This is an exceptional jazz film that most likely would have made its way into art theaters around the world were it not that four months after its premier in jny: New York City, the pandemic struck, and most theaters closed down. However, it is readily available on the web, for example at Amazon ...
read moreAngela's Ring: An Opera Revue of the European Debt Crisis
by Richard J Salvucci
Kabir Sehgal, Marie Incontrera, et al. Angela's Ring Tiger Turn 2021 Opera, we are told, has long been political, and not just since Verdi and Wagner. What would West End musical theater be without Les Mis? Or drama without Barbara Garson's 1966 play, Macbird? Yes, even economics makes a token appearance in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, Wilde's famous line “Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The ...
read moreSylvie's Love
by Mark Sullivan
Sylvie's Love Iam21 Entertainment/Seven Letter Word Films; distributed by Amazon Studios Director: Eugene Ashe Run Time: 114 minutes 2020 Sylvie's Love represents the new paradigm of film production. Produced by traditional film producers, and originally presented at the Sundance Film Festival, the film's main distribution has been online via Amazon's online video streaming service. It tells the story of star-crossed lovers Sylvie Parker (played by Tessa Thompson) and Robert Halloway (played by Nnamdi ...
read moreBillie
by Ian Patterson
Billie New Black Films 96 minutes 2020 A victim of her own self-destructive excesses is a common trope when assessing Billie Holiday. Yet James Erskine's handsome documentary Billie makes a convincing case for Holiday--arguably the greatest of all jazz singers--as more a victim of poverty, racism, manipulation and brutal misogyny. Holiday's story has been amply documented in the past and Erskine sketches the basic biographical details of her life with the aid ...
read moreNever Too Late: The Doc Severinsen Story
by Nicholas F. Mondello
Doc Severinsen Never Too Late: The Doc Severinsen Story A film by Kevin Bright & Jeff Consiglio Just Bright Productions2020 Never Too Late (Just Bright Productions, 2020) is a meticulously produced and emotion-grabbing documentary portrait of the musical career and life of trumpeter Doc Severinsen. While Duke Ellington may have said “Music is My Mistress," in the case of “Never Too Late" we discover—and superbly at that—that Severinsen's career is a “musical Mona ...
read moreZappa
by Ian Patterson
Alex Winter Zappa Magnolia Pictures 2020 Composer, guitarist and iconoclast nonpareil, Frank Zappa was never an easy artist to pin down, as Alex Winter's perceptive and entertaining documentary makes abundantly clear. If an artist's music should speak for itself, what are we to make of Zappa's freakish '60s collage of doo-wop, Stravinsky, rock and burlesque humor, his jazz-rock leanings in the first half of the 1970s, the coarse satire, his musique concrète and ...
read moreShowcase
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Cleveland Time by Matthew Alec
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