All This Jazz

All This Jazz

2 Episodes

Two jazz-inflected riffs by legendary American independent filmmakers make sweet music together in this double feature in double time. Charles Burnett’s charming short WHEN IT RAINS follows a trumpeter on a New Year’s Eve odyssey through Los Angeles as he attempts to save a mother from eviction, his quest punctuated by musical interludes that have the rhythmic, improvisational quality of jazz itself. Shirley Clarke brings a similar freewheeling energy to her appropriately idiosyncratic ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, which blends documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever created into a kaleidoscopic portrait of free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman.

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All This Jazz
  • When it Rains

    Episode 1

    Directed by Charles Burnett • 1995 • United States

    Charles Burnett paints a jazz- and poetry-inflected portrait of African American community and resilience via the story of a mother who enlists a musician’s help when she is evicted on New Year’s Day.

  • Ornette: Made in America

    Episode 2

    Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
    Starring Ornette Coleman

    This freewheeling documentary captures Ornette Coleman’s evolution over three decades. Documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever made chronicle his boyhood in segregated T...