Catalog Search Results
2) Miles ahead
Language
English
Formats
Description
In the midst of a dazzling and prolific career at the forefront of modern jazz innovation, Miles Davis disappears from public view for a period of five years in the late 1970s. Alone and holed up in his home, he is beset by chronic pain from a deteriorating hip, his musical voice stifled and numbed by drugs and medications, and his mind haunted my unsettling ghosts from the past.
3) Low down
Language
English
Description
Based on the memoir by Amy-Jo Albany, it is a compassionate, tender look at the complex relationship between Amy-Jo and her father, legendary jazz musician Joe Albany, a man torn between his musical ambition, his devotion to his teenage daughter, and his suffocating heroin addiction. Set against a sensuously textured 1970s Hollywood, the film beautifully evokes a colorful, seedy world of struggling musicians, artists, and vagabonds.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1122
Language
English
Formats
Description
It is a love letter from director Bertrand Tavernier to the heyday of bebop and to the Black American musicians who found refuge in the smoky underground jazz clubs of 1950s Paris. In a miraculous, sui generis fusion of performer and character that was nominated for an Oscar, legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays Dale Turner, a brilliant New York jazz veteran whose music aches with beauty but whose personal life is ravaged by addiction. Searching...
Series
Criterion collection volume 724
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The preternaturally gifted director and choreographer Bob Fosse turned the camera on his own life for this madly imaginative, self-excoriating musical masterpiece. Roy Scheider gives the performance of his career as Joe Gideon, whose exhausting work schedule-mounting a Broadway production by day and editing his latest movie at night; and routine of amphetamines, booze, and sex are putting his health at serious risk.
6) Bird
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The life of legendary jazz musician Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, directed and produced by jazz fan, Clint Eastwood. The film uses actual recordings by Parker with the backgrounds removed, and accompaniment by modern musicians attuned to the Yardbird's improvisations.
Series
Language
English
Description
In 1928 New York, spirits are high and jazz, dancing and gangsters rule supreme. Harlem's Cotton Club is in the center of it all, where rich upper-eastsiders mix with dressed-up mobsters. On stage is gifted coronet player Dixie Dwyer, who dreams of the big time, and tap sensation Sandman Williams who can't touch his girl, the lovely singer Lila Rose Oliver, because of strict club rules. As tension rises, so do tempers, and the nightclub becomes a...
9) Passion play
Language
English
Description
The last thing washed up jazz musician, Nate Pool, wanted to do was betray sinister gangster, Happy Shannon. But it may be the last thing he does unless he can deliver Lily, a beautiful and mysterious carnival sideshow attraction.
10) Bird
Language
English
Description
The life of legendary jazz musician Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, directed and produced by jazz fan, Clint Eastwood. The film uses actual recordings by Parker with the backgrounds removed, and accompaniment by modern musicians attuned to the Yardbird's improvisations.
11) Mo' better blues
Language
English
Description
Talented trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is obsessed by his music and indecisive about his girlfriends. But when he is forced to come to the aid of his manager and chilhood friend, Bleek finds his world more fragile than he ever imagined.
12) Mo' better blues
Series
Language
English
Description
A jazz trumpeter obsessed with his music and indecisive about his girlfriends finds his life is fragile when he must come to the aid of his manager.