DVDs
November 2008 By Mike Joyce
The Walker’s Duets
There are moments during this collection of duets, taped over a five-year period at Walker’s in Lower Manhattan, when you half expect Peter Leitch to put down his guitar, stand up and call for a little quiet. Really, people! What’s distracting is not just...
November 2008 By Bill Meredith
Imaginary Day Live
Guitarist Pat Metheny thumbed his nose at the recording industry in 1994 with the CD Zero Tolerance for Silence, but its 40 minutes of white-noise feedback proved a point. Metheny knew he was popular enough for a major label like Geffen not to release it...
June 2008 By Bill Milkowski
Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz
The story of the classic jazz label Blue Note is essentially the story of Alfred Lion, a German emigre whose love affair with jazz began in 1926 when he saw Sam Wooding’s Chocolate Dandies as a young boy in Berlin. “It was the first time I saw colored musicians...
June 2008 By Jeff Tamarkin
The Way of Beauty
East-West fusions are so common now that the idea of a British guitarist with a jazz-rock pedigree mixing it up with Indian classical musicians raises no eyebrows. But in 1975, when John McLaughlin debuted Shakti, the concept and the music itself were downright...
June 2008 By Jeff Tamarkin
Play Your Own Thing: A Story of Jazz in Europe
Jan Garbarek, the Norwegian saxophonist, states the theme of Julian Benedikt’s instructive 90-minute documentary early in the program. “We’ll never be Charlie Parker,” he says, “but we have something else.” Throughout, European jazz artists express similar...
June 2008 By Christopher Loudon
A Tribute to Edith Piaf
Yes, Edith Piaf was as quintessentially French as Brie, Bardot and Henri Cartier-Bresson. But her influence and appeal knew no borders. So it is entirely appropriate that this tribute, captured live at Montreux in July 2004, calls upon an international assortment...
June 2008 By Bill Milkowski
A Musical Portrait
In Mark Kidel’s revealing documentary profile of the late, great Joe Zawinul, we come to understand the source of the composer-keyboardist’s mental and physical toughness, qualities that informed his outward swagger and fueled his supreme self-confidence...
May 2008 By Will Smith
Symphony in Riffs
Less a musical offering than a visual tribute to the long, achievement-filled career of alto saxophonist, trumpeter, bandleader and composer-arranger Benny Carter, Symphony in Riffs follows his ascent from fairly humble beginnings in New York City through...
May 2008 By Christopher Loudon
At the Côte d’Azur with Ella Fitzgerald and Joan Miró/The Last Jam Session
The rather dusty black-and-white footage, dating from the summer of 1966, opens with bikinis, beach umbrellas and Foster Grant-shaded sophisticates strolling La Croisette. The scene then shifts to a surprisingly drab hotel suite, where Duke Ellington explains...
May 2008 By Jeff Tamarkin
Congo Square
No one alive bore first-hand witness to the music played by African slaves in pre-Civil War New Orleans and, of course, no recordings exist. So the most Wynton Marsalis could have hoped to accomplish with his ambitious, two-hour, 14-movement Congo Square...
