Film Review
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Never Too Late: The Doc Severinsen Story
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
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 moreRonnie Wood: Somebody Up There Likes Me
Ronnie Wood Somebody Up There Likes Me Eagle Rock Entertainment 2020 The colloquialism from which the Ronnie Wood video documentary takes its title, Somebody Up There Likes Me, might well also reference the high-profile musicians with whom he's collaborated over the course of a remarkably enduring career: Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, and Mick Jagger/Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. In a reflection of 'Woody”s life as he describes it with such unaffected nonchalance, Academy ...
read moreRolling Stones: Steel Wheels Live
The Rolling Stones Steel Wheels Live Eagle Rock Entertainment 2020 The Rolling Stones have previously covered their Steel Wheels (Rolling Stones, 1989) tour on Live At The Tokyo Dome 1990 (Eagle, 2012), but given its significance in their career timeline, it's no surprise that the band has decided to revisit it again. It is, however, no criticism of Steel Wheels Live to state its almost subliminal temptation to suggest that a viewer who has ...
read moreDamien Chazelle's Netflix Show "The Eddy"
I picked up the gauntlet and watched the eight episodes of the Netflix show The Eddy because it was promoted as being directed by Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed the films Whiplash and La La Land. Chazelle is something of a bête noire for jazz people, who've been highly critical of his approach to jazz. I've always sensed in his films an oddly ambivalence relationship to jazz, even a whiff of pathology and I needed to investigate further.
read moreVoice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho
Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho A film by Liam Barker Liam Barker Film Production2015/2019 Acoustic guitar music wouldn't be the same without the pioneering effort of John Fahey, but If Fahey became the face of what he dubbed American Primitive music, a genre of advanced acoustic guitar music influenced by country-blues, Robbie Basho was just as important in opening the vista of guitar playing. Whereas Fahey's hero was country-blues guitarist, Charlie ...
read moreMiles Davis: Birth of the Cool - A Film By Stanley Nelson (2 DVD)
Miles Davis Birth of the Cool: A Film by Stanley Nelson Eagle Entertainment 2020 The two-DVD package of Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool -A Film by Stanley Nelson reminds potential viewers to interpret the title broadly rather than literally. To be sure, the award-winning filmmaker and historian delves deeply into the conception and execution of that landmark music in his near two-hour piece of cinema. But his scholarly investigation is ultimately ...
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