Jazz on a Summer's Day. He made it, with two years to spare. The result, Jazz on a Summer's Day , is a luminously breezy film that brings the rich color palette of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar of those years into the world of the documentary cinema. Along with Monterey Pop , and Woodstock , and The Last Waltz , Bert Stern and his co-director, the equally well-regarded jazz connoisseur Aram Avakian, created one of the great concert films, but Jazz on a Summer's Day is more than that: it is a meandering summer stream of a film, always ready to glance away from the music for a minute, to take in a girl in a red sweater, or a fat guy in his swimming trunks, or kids playing, always ready to let the incredible music it captures take the film into new flights of improvisation and imagination. But, oh, that music. Jazz on a Summer's Day captures the Newport Jazz Festival, a summit meeting of jazz greats we'll never see the like of again. The Festival had been started in on the greenswards of Newport, Rhode Island, the brainchild of a young impresario and jazz lover named George Wein. It seemed a strange match, as the seaside home of American old money became, for a few days every summer, the home of a music that had grown from anonymous, working class roots. But soon Newport rang to the brilliant sounds of the jazz aristocracy. The Duke Ellington orchestra's performance on the night of July 8, , of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," with solo saxophonist Paul Gonsalves taking an incredible 27 straight choruses , typified the electricity that Newport generated.


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With film festivals, curation is only half the battle; the other half is for the viewer to pick the right films. Even generally mediocre festivals usually have a few excellent movies, just as even superbly programmed festivals are likely to have some weak offerings. Several of the performances are among the treasures of filmed music; all of them, whatever their musical merit, are filmed with a rare artistry, a rare attention to making images of music that are themselves musical.
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See the full list. Title: Jazz on a Summer's Day A documentary film about the life of pianist and jazz great Thelonious Sphere Monk. Features live performances by Monk and his band, and interviews with friends and family about the offbeat genius. Created under the guidance of jazz impresario and Verve Records founder Norman Granz, this short captures the spontaneity of a jam session and is one of few film records of black jazzers of the day including tenor sax legend Lester Young. A teenager who witnesses the murder of his father vows to exact revenge on the four mobsters involved in the killing. A look at the spirit of New Orleans. First a funeral: Allen Toussaint explains that you arrive slow and cut up afterwards. Then it's food, with a lesson in eating crayfish at Frankie and
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