DVD/Video/Film Reviews

James Booker Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker Lily Keber 2013 Ask jazz fans outside of New Orleans if they have heard of James Booker and most will lean back, rub their chin and say they know they have heard the name. Unless you lived in Europe in the seventies and ...

[ This encore presentation from January 2009 celebrates Jean Bach, director of A Great Day in Harlem. Ms. Bach died on May 27th at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. ] It is probably the most celebrated ensemble jazz portrait of all time. Fifty-seven of the greatest jazz musicians gathered together on the ...

The Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet Concert For Fukushima Wels 2011 PanRec/Trost Records 2013

In 2011 the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria, celebrated Peter Brötzmann's 70th birthday (as well as the festival's 25th year edition), under the title Long Story Short. Brötzmann was asked to curate the program and after two years of ...

Kimmo Pohjonen Soundbreaker Koskela Art and Media 2013 In the hands of avant-accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen, the mechanical intricacies of his instrument become agents of a great musical power, grace and expression. An instrumental virtuoso, Pohjonen has exploited the complete potential of the keys, buttons, and air beneath his fingers by stretching both his ...

Woody Herman Blue Flame--Portrait Of A Legand Jazzed Media 2012 Born on May 16, 1913, Woodrow Charles “Woody" Herman is the subject of this feature-length documentary, produced by Jazzed Media's Graham Carter in association with Al Julian's The Woody Herman Society in recognition of the clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, bandleader and American jazz ...

Savion Glover Fours Half Note Records 2012 Tap titan Savion Glover has been known to bring in the noise and the funk, but this DVD is about bringing out the jazz. Glover, the dancer/actor/choreographer who sits at the top of the tap pyramid, has long been inspired by this music and the figures ...

U2 From the Sky Down Documentary Partners 2012 Music documentaries get more viable and interesting as more and more renowned film directors grab their chance to prove themselves in the genre. Apart from ordinary documentaries that only provide biographical data or sketches, some of them serve as a modern day visual novels, delivering ...

Artistry Jazz Group Live For The First Time Volenza 2012 This DVD records a big day in the small world of Scandinavian jazz: after two first class studio albums, Artistry Jazz Group performing live for the first time. And it does so in Södra Teatern, Stockholm's oldest theater, built in 1859 on the ...

Led Zeppelin Celebration Day Three P Films Limited 2012 Many biographies and history books reveal that in the early autumn of 1968, in a stuffy London rehearsal room, guitarist Jimmy Page gathered together a group of newly found musical colleagues-- singer Robert Plant, bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham--to ...

Woody Herman Blue Flame: Portrait Of A Jazz Legend Jazzed Media 2012

Innovation and boundary pushing is often seen as a young man's game, so the obvious question is, how did clarinetist/saxophonist/vocalist/bandleader extraordinaire Woody Herman manage to keep things fresh for virtually his entire half-century run? The answer is so simple that it ...

Barry Guy / London Jazz Composers Orchestra Harmos Live At Schaffhausen Intakt 2012 For those who thought they had missed their chance to see one of the most impressive agglomerations of talent in European improvisation, the 2008 appearance of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra in Switzerland was manna from heaven. Having last played ...

Pat Metheny The Orchestrion Project Eagle Eye Media 2012 When guitarist Pat Metheny released Orchestrion (Nonesuch) in 2010, it almost immediately became one of his most controversial recordings since Zero Tolerance for Silence (Warner Bros., 1992). Why, in a jazz world, where interaction with other musicians is so fundamental to its spirit, to ...

Anton Corbijn Inside Out CTM Films 2012 There are plenty of documentaries about all kinds of bands and musicians, but there aren't many documentaries about photographers that have helped put them on the music pedestal. Probably the only existing documentaries on music photographers are those about photographers Annie Leibovitz and Robert Knight. Inside ...

Takayuki Kato/ Yasuhiro Yoshigaki/ Kumiko Takara Tu-Mu-Go #1 Studio Ba-Lu-Lu Ba-Lu 2012

This Japanese trio is comprised by one of the most innovative and inventive guitarists on the Japanese scene, Takayuki Kato, who rarely plays outside Japan; prolific drummer and percussionist Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, leader of his own percussion ensemble, Orquesta Nudge! Nudge!; and ...