Accompanied by a menagerie of products, Ken Burns's expansive 10-episode paean, Jazz, completes his trilogy on American culture, following The Civil War and Baseball. Spanning more than 19 hours, Jazz is, of course, about a lot more than what many have called America's classical music-especially in episodes 1 through 7. It's here that Burns unearths precious visual images of jazz musicians and hangs historical narratives around the music with convincing authority. Time can stand still as images float past to the sound of grainy vintage jazz, and the drama of a phonograph needle being placed on Louis Armstrong's celestial "West End Blues" is nearly sublime. The film is also potent in arguing that the history of race in the 20th-century U. S. is at jazz's heart. But a few problems arise. First is Burns's reliance on Wynton Marsalis as his chief musical commentator. Marsalis might be charming and musically expert, but he's no historian. [+]

From Mahalia Jackson to Aretha Franklin to Shirley Caesar, these performances offer a fascinating look into the origins of gospel music. Vintage recordings and modern performances highlight this song-filled history of an American art form.

When Imagine the Sound was released in 1981, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum deemed it "the best documentary on free jazz that we have. " Decades later, the same praise holds true. Director Ron Mann (Grass, Comicbook Confidential) gathered four seminal avant-garde jazz musicians-pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and trumpet player Bill Dixon-in a studio for interviews and individual performances. The result is an incredibly philosophical look at the how their social, political, and creative free-form explorations changed the face of jazz music in the early '60s. Like free-jazz players improvising on tonality and time, this documentary itself is structureless, as Mann continuously spins off on different tangents. He weaves numerous heady interviews-completely devoid of nostalgia-with long, uninterrupted, intimate sequences of all of the musicians breaking new musical ground. During one particularly illuminating interview, Bley states that free jazz arrived from a "tremendous disdain for the known," and the same can be said of Mann's thrilling approach here. -Dave McCoy The first feature documentary by Ron Mann (Grass, Comicbook Confidential) is an eloquent tribute to a group of highly celebrated artists that helped forge the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s. Critic and film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has said Imagine the SoundI "may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have. " The film features mind expanding interviews and singular, dramatic performances by pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, tenor saxophone Archie Shepp, and trumpet player Bill Dixon. [+]