
Joëlle Léandre

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0.0An important audio-visual record of a landmark series of four concerts staged in London in 2022 when more than 30 musicians joined improviser, percussionist and animateur Eddie Prévost to mark his 80th birthday. The film takes a close look at improvisers who create music in the moment, free from the authority of a composer, score or conductor. Ranging from profound delicacy to subversive atonality, the “awkward wealth” of this music raises vital questions about artistic freedom, individual responsibility and what it means for people to make music together in the 21st Century. Featuring performances by John Butcher, Sue Lynch, Ute Kanngiesser, Marjolaine Charbin, Nathan Moore, Seymour Wright, Veryan Weston, Alan Wilkinson, John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost amongst others. Plus readings by musician and author David Toop. The film includes the last ever concert by AMM, the pioneering improvising group co-founded by Eddie Prévost in the mid-1960s.
0.0Cecil 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.
7.0Aspiring director Corky St. Clair and the marginally talented amateur cast of his hokey small-town musical production go overboard when they learn that Broadway theater agent Mort Guffman will be in attendance.
This early travelogue film, made in a Kenyan train station, captures an impromptu musical performance. Some passengers eagerly join in while others sleep—blissfully unaware of the performance taking place around them.
7.1At an orphanage, the children are sad because they received used defective toys as gifts. Professor Grampy sees the children while passing by in his sled and has an idea on how to give them a merry Christmas.
0.0Angel Bat Dawid - one of the great jazz discoveries of recent years as a guest at Chassol in Ground Control. Chicago-native Angel Bat Dawid is one of the many talents tracked down by the US label International Anthem. Together with trumpeter Jaimie Branch and drummer Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid ensures that the "Windy City" is on the radar for jazz all over the world. The musician switches between vocals, clarinet and piano with amazing ease. But apart from that, Angel Bat Dawid is able to breathe a highly spiritual dimension into her music like no other, so that her jazz almost borders on gospel. Listening to the multi-instrumentalist therefore sometimes has something of a transcendental experience, at times reminiscent of the music of Sun Ra. This concert at Ground Control reveals all the artistic glory of their music. Recording of July 4, 2022 at Ground Control, Paris.
10.0Live 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.
0.0The 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.
0.0Filmed in and around percussionist Milford Grave’s last public concert in his neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens.
5.8In 1989, a collective of young hip hop artists gathered at a health food café in South Central Los Angeles. Their mandate? To reject gang culture and expand the musical boundaries of hip hop. DuVernay's documentary chronicles the historic legacy of the Good Life Cafe — the open mic nights that became an L.A. institution, the eclectic array of talented young MCs that emerged there, the alternative hip hop movement they developed, and their worldwide influence on the artform.
6.7Recorded at Auditório Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo , on 24 and 25 June 2006 , the album features the biggest hits singer-songwriter Lenine's career such as "Paciência" (Patience), "Jack Soul Brasileiro" (Since I am Brazilian), "Na Pressão" (On The Pressure), "A Rede" (The Net), "Hoje Eu Quero Sair Só" (I Want Go Out Alone, Today) and "A Medida da Paixão" (The Measure of Passion), plus new songs like "Tudo Por Acaso" (All By Chance). The album features special participations from musicians such as the Chilean Victor Astorga (the first English horn soloist with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra), Cameroonian bassist and singer Richard Bona, Mexican singer Julieta Venegas, harpist Cristina Braga, the rapper Gog, and drummer Iggor Cavalera (ex-member of Sepultura). The DVD includes bonus material, plus making-of scenes, reviews, testimonials about the project, the guests and also footage of the 2006 World Cup, since the performance was recorded concurrently with it.
10.0In 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.
6.8An 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.
6.3Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.
0.0This 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.
The Sonny Sharrock Band live in Prague as part of the Knitting Factory Festival Tour of Europe 1990.
6.3From radical turntablism (Otomo Yoshihide) to laptop music innovation (Numb), via classical instrument hijacking (Sakamoto Hiromichi), Tokyo's avant-garde music scene is internationally known for its boldness. While introducing some of the greatest musicians of this scene, "We Don't Care About Music Anyway..." offers a kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo, confronting music and noise, sound and image, reality and representation, documentary and fiction.
5.9Filmed 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.
10.0Two young strangers meet in Naples and begin to flirt and dance in the street.
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 ...