Movies and TvShows featuring "free-jazz" theme.
Biopic about jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe and his wife, noted writer Izumi Suzuki.
This film explores freedom of speech in the United States of America
The bold and ferocious harmonic imagination of John Coltrane is laid bare in this concert, captured at the Comblain-La-Tour Festival in Belgium, 1965. Alongside his famed quartet, he delivers a transcendent performance that is marked by the total physicality of the music – four sets of hands moving with restless vigour as vapour literally rises from their shoulders and into the night sky.
Cecil Taylor was the grand master of free jazz piano. "All the Notes" captures in breezy fashion the unconventional stance of this media-shy modern musical genius, regarded as one of the true giants of post-war music. Seated at his beloved and battered piano in his Brooklyn brownstone the maestro holds court with frequent stentorian pronouncements on life, art and music.
Live archive release from the Jazz legend. Thelonious Monk Paris 1969 is a fascinating and important late-career document of the legendary Jazz pianist and composer in performance with his Quartet at the Salle Pleyel concert hall in Paris, France on December 15, 1969. The concert also featured a surprise guest appearance from renowned drummer Philly Joe Jones. Filmed in Black & White.
An experimental music ensemble is recording an album. They want a very specific sound: the sound of thick air. The sound engineer struggles to understand and to find that sound. A tale of sleepless nights and loud music, a noise-injected collage composed of diaristic footage, a found narrative (memories of a popular 60s band), original music and field recordings.
Filmed in Chicago & finished in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race - a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, foreseeing the civil unrest of subsequent decades, it also features the only known footage of visionary pianist Sun Ra from his beloved Chicago period. Featured are ample images of tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and the rest of Ra's Arkestra in Windy City nightclubs, all shot in glorious black & white.
Fire Music is a captivating documentary that explores the revolutionary genre of free jazz. Through interviews, live performances, and archival footage, the film delves into the impact and significance of free jazz on the music scene and its cultural implications. It follows the journey of influential musicians as they broke free from traditional structures, creating a new form of expression through improvisation and experimentation.
Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.
This feature-length documentary chronicles the life and playful methods of Dutch pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg, a significant figure in post-WWII European Jazz and free improvisation. Archival footage, rehearsal / performance sequences and interviews with both Mengelberg (the "godfather of Dutch improvised music") and key collaborators provide a clear insight in Mengelberg's original way of thinking and way of working.
A bored and unhappy woman in a loveless marriage finds herself drawn to a jazz cafe and immersed in the lives of the people around her. As she becomes more dissatisfied with her own life, she starts to emulate the behaviors and actions of those she envies, leading to tension and conflict within her family.
Motian in Motion is a captivating documentary that explores the life and career of one of the most influential jazz drummer-percussionists. The film delves into the artist's journey, from his early days in the jazz scene of New York City to his innovative approaches to rhythm and improvisation. Motian in Motion showcases the impact and legacy of this esteemed musician in the realms of free jazz, be-bop, and jazz fusion.
How do you become Peter Brötzmann? How do you become what you are: a painter, a musician, an absolute artist? Europe was nothing but a ruin and shame possessed the heart of the young Germans. They needed to invent, scream, regain a lost brotherhood. Overcome this silence! That’s how some young German, British, Dutch, Belgian… musicians made Europe exist long before Maastrich and have kept on cherishing, imperturbably, their freedom! They are no longer twenty-year-olds, but others have followed. They set themselves one constraint: reinvent everything every time. A way to take the very instant into account, to let the unexpected in, to match to the world.
A surreal and hypnotic journey through the mind of a magician in Sicily, filled with live music, free jazz, and surrealistic elements. A cyclops appears throughout the film, adding to the dreamlike atmosphere. The film explores themes of memory and identity without the use of dialogue.
Retracing the longstanding career of avant-garde drummer Sunny Murray, one of the most influential figures of the Free jazz revolution. Through a series of interviews with key time witnesses as well as historic and contemporary concert footage, it reassesses the relationship between the libertarian music movement and the political events of the 1960s, whose social claims it so intimately reflected. By doing so, it also recounts how the most radical forms of musical expression were excluded from the major production and distribution networks as the libertarian ideal went out of fashion. Beyond its historical approach, the film follows Sunny Murray on current gigs, showing his daily struggle to perpetuate a musical genre which is still widely ignored by the general public. In doing so, Sunny's time now also dwells on the near-clandestine community of aficionados who continue to worship the gods of their musical coming of age, and whose unfaltering support has permitted free ...
Filmed during Max Devereaux’s senior year of high school with classmates as cast and crew, this black-and-white short tells the story of a man who wakes from a nightmare only to find the undead stalking the night. Originally released in 2013 with an unlicensed score, it was quickly taken down, only to be resurrected nearly a decade later as a silent film with a newly improvised free-jazz guitar soundtrack by Devereaux himself. Equal parts horror homage and DIY time capsule, the film transforms its youthful origins and troubled history into a fittingly undead return.
The Sonny Sharrock Band live in Prague as part of the Knitting Factory Festival Tour of Europe 1990.
Don Cherry walks around and plays music
Filmed in and around percussionist Milford Grave’s last public concert in his neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens.