The 1959 Newport Jazz Festival was a true musical watershed, as Jazz on a Summer's Day reveals. This 75-minute film captures an event poised on the cusp of a new era, as the cool jazz of Jimmy Guiffre and the effortless scat of Anita O'Day intermingle with the hard bop of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and the smouldering fusion overtones of the Chico Hamilton Quintet. There's a crisp ...
In 1990, Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan was just emerging from a long period in which drugs had taken their toll: the previous year's In Step album was the first he had made "clean", and the results were a marvel. But then, after sharing a stage with Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and Eric Clapton, he boarded a helicopter to Chicago. It crashed and the career of one of the great blues ...
It's been said that Diana Krall is a more successful recording artist than she is a live performer, yet Live in Paris seems to have captured the best of both worlds. Krall has evolved into a performer of extraordinary intensity. She treats what is essentially a set of jazz vocal standards as a kind of musical performance poetry which reflects the subtlest nuance of every lyric; while her ...