During a decade rife with paranoia, in the middle of the McCarthy era, Music Inn was a bold experiment. Halfway between the Second World War and The Civil Rights Movement, Phil and Stephanie Barber created an oasis in the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts where aspiring musicians came to learn from the very best. Students and faculty, young and old, rich and poor, white, black, and brown convened together and learned from each other. Defying the surrounding environment, Music Inn harbored a racial and cultural harmony where music was all that mattered.
Himself (archive footage)
Documentary about the blacklisted folk group The Weavers, and the events leading up to their triumphant return to Carnegie Hall.
Imagine hanging out with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, hearing them jam together, trading riffs, then riffing with words and trading stories. Bird and Diz are gone, but giants still walk among us. One of those giants is Buster Williams. Buster has played with everyone - Miles, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Art Blakey, and on. In this intimate portrait, Buster trades stories, and plays, with some of the world's greatest musicians - Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride and others, and takes us on a journey through his life, legacy, and America's greatest art form - the truly universal music called Jazz.
Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.
Poet, musician, visual artist, and Afrofuturist Moor Mother roams a hallucinatory Mojave Desert alone. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Moor Mother visits the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra HQ and plays with jazz luminaries and elders, including Henry “The Skipper” Franklin, Michael Session, and Maia.
Set in the North Carolina Appalachians, Sprout Wings and Fly honors the fiddle playing of 82-year-old Tommy Jarrell of Toast, NC. Tommy was quirky, gregarious and generous, and this film shows him at his best, in fine fiddling form.
CMC’s visionary leaders and artists to celebrate one of San Francisco’s most-revered and longest-running community arts programs.
Through concerts and interviews, folk-progressive group Harmonium takes Quebec culture to California. This documentary full of colour and sound, filmed in California in 1978, recounts the ups and downs of the journey of the Quebec musical group Harmonium, who came to feel the pulse of Americans and see if culture, their culture, can succeed in crossing borders.
Chronicles the 50-year career of singer/songwriter Jean Ritchie, from Viper, Kentucky to the New York stage. Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and her family and friends in Eastern Kentucky are among those interviewed. A 1996 KET production.
Following folk musician Joan Baez on her extensive 2008-2009 tour, this film commemorates her career, which has spanned five decades. It includes concert and archival footage as well as interviews with such disparate colleagues, friends and admirers as Bob Dylan, Jesse Jackson and David Crosby. In addition to the music, it also touchs upon Baez's long history of global social activism.
This television special is a first for the reclusive singer with the BBC documentary gaining new interviews with Young, nine months apart in New York and California. The documentary also looks back over the singer's archives, with some never-seen-before material.
In March 2005, Neil Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. Four days before he was scheduled for a lifesaving operation, he headed to Nashville, where he wrote and recorded the country folk album Prairie Wind with old friends and family members. After the successful operation and recovery period, he returned to Nashville that August to play at the famed Ryman Auditorium, once again gathering together friends and family for this special performance.
This documentary chronicles the rise, fall, and rise again of the soft rock epitomized by artists such as Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, and Toto in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Retroactively dubbed "Yacht Rock," the easy-listening genre came to be gently mocked and even dismissed by rock lovers and critics. However, it has since reclaimed its place in music history and is celebrated in this groove-infused film.
An intimate look at the Woodstock Music & Art Festival held in Bethel, NY in 1969, from preparation through cleanup, with historic access to insiders, blistering concert footage, and portraits of the concertgoers; negative and positive aspects are shown, from drug use by performers to naked fans sliding in the mud, from the collapse of the fences by the unexpected hordes to the surreal arrival of National Guard helicopters with food and medical assistance for the impromptu city of 500,000.
Documentary following English folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention as they celebrate their 45th anniversary in 2012. Fairport's iconic 1969 album Liege and Lief featured some of folk music's biggest names - including singer Sandy Denny, guitarist Richard Thompson and fiddler Dave Swarbrick - and was voted by Radio 2 listeners as the most influential folk album of all time.
A portrait of inspirational jazz drummer and teacher Art Blakey with Dizzy Gillespie, many pupils including Wayne Shorter, the Marsalis brothers, and a surprising new generation of musicians and dancers.
On the edge of the 30th anniversary of punk rock, Punk's Not Dead takes you into the sweaty underground clubs, backyard parties, recording studios, shopping malls and stadiums where punk rock music and culture continue to thrive.
"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.
Best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, Robert Moog was an American pioneer of electronic music, and shaped musical culture with some of the most inspiring electronic instruments ever created. This "compelling documentary portrait of a provocative, thoughtful and deeply sympathetic figure" (New York Times) peeks into the inventor's mind and the worldwide phenomenon he fomented.
After the success of the first Country’s Family Reunion, we had to go back and do it all over again! This series includes Box Car Willie, Leroy Van Dyke, Bobby Lord, Stan Hitchcock, Stonewall Jackson and many more!
"What would the world be like without Beethoven?" That’s the provocative question posed by this music documentary from Deutsche Welle. To answer it, the film explores how Ludwig van Beethoven's innovations continue to have an impact far beyond the boundaries of classical music, 250 years after his birth.