High school student Dai Miyamoto has his life is turned upside down the day he discovers jazz. Picking up a saxophone and leaving his sleepy hometown for the bustling nightclubs of Tokyo, Dai will find that the life of a professional musician isn’t for the faint of heart, as he must confront what it truly means to be great.
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.
Stories and music of Black artists who relied on an underground travel guide to navigate the injustices of racial segregation while on the road. The Negro Travelers’ Green Book was a directory of lodgings, restaurants, and entertainment venues where African Americans were welcomed. Features performances and interviews with vocalists, musicians, activists, historians, and others.
Inside the Blue Note nightclub one night in 1959 Paris, an aged, ailing jazzman coaxes an eloquent wail from his tenor sax. Outside, a young Parisian too broke to buy a glass of wine strains to hear those notes. Soon they will form a friendship that sparks a final burst of genius.
Taken in by the musical world as a young orphan, Rick Martin grows up with a desire to play pure jazz instead of the commercial gigs he lands, whilst also coping with the problems caused by his tempestuous marriage to an aloof heiress.
A group of delinquent high school girls form a band when they accidentally poison their school's brass band and have to replace them.
Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology.
In 1927, a Kansas City, Missouri cornet player and his band perform nightly at a seedy speakeasy until a racketeer tries to extort them in exchange for protection.
A comprehensive history of European Jazz, exploring the origins of the US-influenced Jazz clubs after the Second World War, the first steps independent of American jazz and the various changes of direction that have repeatedly occurred in European jazz in the search for that "own voice" that European jazz musicians have helped to form. Featuring the great masters of European jazz such as Chris Barber, Jan Garbarek, Juliette Gréco, Stefano Bollani and Till Brönner, to name but a few.
Young Benny Goodman is taught clarinet by a music professor. He is advised to play whichever kind of music he likes best, but to make a living, Benny begins by joining the Ben Pollack traveling band.
The story of legendary jazz drummer, Gene Krupa. Since his youth, all Gene ever wanted to do is play the drums and make music. This is something his parents would not approve of- they want him to be a priest. When Gene's father dies he promises to enter the priesthood. He soon realizes that he doesn't belong there and leaves to join his friend, Eddie's band. Ethel, Eddie's girlfriend, convinces Gene to go to New York and make it big. The 3 of them head to New York. Here Ethel and Gene soon fall in love and Gene makes a name for himself. Gene starts to live in the fast lane, with drugs, alcohol, women and parties. Ethel, unhappy with Gene's lifestyle, leaves him. Gene soon "hits rock bottom" where he has to face reality and choose where to take his life.
In January 2025, experimental jazz duo Myshko Birchenko and Yevhen Puhachov, members of Hyphen Dash, travelled to Kramatorsk without any pre-made drafts or demo recordings to use music as a vessel to capture the emotions present in a place on the edge of a battle for survival and explore the therapeutic nature of music and improvisation in the brutal reality of war. They packed all the equipment into a car, drove 700 kilometres from Kyiv to the frontline city Kramatorsk, and turned one of many basements which serve as shelters into a makeshift recording studio. As a result, they recorded over 300 minutes of music, which were eventually distilled into a 90-minute album.
The relationship between an aspiring dancer and a popular songstress provides a retrospective of the great African-American entertainers of the early 1900s.
While flying to the first stop on their latest tour, the four members of the Australian music group The Seekers recall in flashback the origins of the group and their rise to success.
LIVE IN EUROPE 1969 lives up to the Miles Davis Bootleg Series mission of presenting live performances that are previously unreleased, have previously only been bootlegged, or are very rare. This new set is the first collection of Miles's Third Great Quintet, the "Lost" Band of 1968-1970 with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette at their peak (they were never recorded in the studio). The album captures the short-lived quintet in three separate concert settings, starting with two full-length (one hour-plus) sets at the Antibes Jazz Festival in France, in Stockholm as part of "The Newport Jazz Festival In Europe," and completed with a stunning 46-minute performance at the Berlin Philharmonie, filmed in color. Recorded 11/7/69 at Berliner Jazztage in the Berlin Philharmonie 1. Introduction by John O Brien-Docker 2. Directions 3. Bitches Brew 4. It s About That Time 5. I Fall In Love Too Easily 6. Sanctuary 7. The Theme
A documentary about the life and music of Justin Pearson. An enigmatic underground musician and owner of Three One G records.
An egotistical saxophone player and a young singer meet on V-J Day and embark upon a strained and rocky romance, even as their careers begin a long uphill climb.
"It must schwing!" was the motto of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two German Jewish immigrants who in 1939 set up Blue Note Records, the jazz label that was home to such greats as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins. Blue Note, the most successful movie ever made about jazz, is a testimony to the passion and vision of these two men and certainly swings like the propulsive sounds that made their label so famous.
During the 1960s, two American jazz musicians living in Paris meet and fall in love with two American tourist girls and must decide between music and love.
Alvin Queen is one of the best jazz drummers of all time. A child prodigy, he played with the greatest masters (Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Pharaoh Sanders... ) He is also a very nice person who has a lot of wisdom to transmit. He shows it beautifully in this first episode of "Seeds of Success".