Movies: Jazz

Wild Man Blues is a 1998 documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple, about the musical avocation of actor/director/comic Woody Allen. The film takes its name from a jazz composition sometimes attributed to Jelly Roll Morton and sometimes to Louis Ar...

The daughter of a preacher becomes the centerpiece for a conservative political campaign but finds herself falling in love with a woman....

A short documentary on jazz trombonist, Ryan Porter....

In the wake of his father’s suicide, young record collector Ollie Sway returns to the family lake house with his friend Nikolai in tow to lay claim to an invaluable jazz recording. An unexpected visit from Ollie’s estranged grandmother and a chance e...

A musician tries to get by working several jobs....

A fifteen-year-old boy wants to buy a gun from an adult racketeer named Priest, in order to become president of the gang to which he belongs, and to return them to active "bopping" (gang fighting) which has declined in Harlem....

A mythical account of the life of Buddy Bolden, the first Cornet King of New Orleans....

John Pettibone (Droopy), a dog whose love of Dixieland music is not appreciated by those around him, has a lucky meeting with Pee-Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland band at the circus....

Explore the vision behind the iconic American jazz record label. Since 1939, Blue Note artists have been encouraged to push creative boundaries in search of uncompromising expressions. Through current recording sessions, rare archive and conversation...

Director — and piano player — Clint Eastwood explores his life-long passion for piano blues, using a treasure trove of rare historical footage in addition to interviews and performances by such living legends as Pinetop Perkins and Jay McShann, as we...

Bayou Maharajah explores the life and music of New Orleans piano legend James Booker, the man Dr. John described as "the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced." A brilliant pianist, his eccentricities and showman...

Jeff grows up near Basin Street in New Orleans, playing his clarinet with the dock workers. He puts together a band, the Basin Street Hot-Shots, which includes a cornet player, Memphis. They struggle to get their jazz music accepted by the cafe socie...

"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 Blak...

In this short film, prominent jazz musicians of the 1940s gather for a rare filming of a jam session. This highly stylized chronicle features tenor sax legend Lester Young....

A rising nineteen-year-old singer by the name of Billie Holiday made her screen debut in this musical landmark, which features Duke Ellington and his orchestra performing his symphonic jazz piece “A Rhapsody of Negro Life” set to scenes of everyday A...

Martin, a nu-jazz trumpet player with a unique style, is fighting against convention and mediocrity. He will not accept any compromise, neither in his music, nor in love. When he gets the feeling that Kristina, the love of his life, only loves him fo...

Atlanta musicians behind some of the biggest names in music embark on an uncertain journey into the spotlight with a new genre of music that fuses trap music with jazz....

A documentary about the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records and its German founders Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff. As jews they had to flee Germany and the Hitler regime in the late 1930s. In New York they wrote music history with their record lab...

Betty Boop and friends meet Louis Armstrong on a jungle safari....

Filmed 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, for...