Aspiring director Corky St. Clair and the marginally talented amateur cast of his hokey small-town musical production go overboard when they learn that Broadway theater agent Mort Guffman will be in attendance.

This feature-length documentary chronicles the life and playful methods of Dutch pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg, a significant figure in post-WWII European Jazz and free improvisation. Archival footage, rehearsal / performance sequences and interviews with both Mengelberg (the "godfather of Dutch improvised music") and key collaborators provide a clear insight in Mengelberg's original way of thinking and way of working.

Blue for a Moment is a documentary portrait of Swedish-born, Berlin-based musician Sven-Åke Johansson, a key figure in European improvised and experimental music. Active as a jazz drummer, composer, poet and visual artist, Johansson has spent decades challenging artistic conventions and genre boundaries. Born in 1943, he moved to Berlin in the late 1960s and became involved in the city’s experimental scene, including the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. During the 1970s and 1980s he played an important role in the West Berlin free jazz movement around the FMP/SÅJ label, collaborating with musicians such as Alexander von Schlippenbach and Rüdiger Carl. Influenced by Fluxus and modernist traditions, Johansson developed a distinctive approach based on noise, reduction and the use of everyday materials, anticipating the Echtzeitmusik scene that emerged in Berlin after 1990. The film explores his creative process, artistic philosophy and lasting impact on contemporary experimental music.

When young musicians come together to play classical music, they send out a strong signal to our today’s world. The film follows talented young Swiss musicians as they work, search for inspiration, but also expose their thought how to play nowadays the “old” Classical music.

In this short film from 1967, filmmaker Henry English attempts to place a context around saxophonist and composer Marion Brown’s flurries of notes and expression. Juxtaposed against performance footage and scenes from Brown’s environment are the musician’s spoken observations in which he, in a gentle Georgia accent, explains some of who he is and how his chosen form of expression (wild, free lines of spontaneous sound) may not be as alien as it must have seemed in 1967. (Austin Film Society)

Cecil Taylor was the grand master of free jazz piano. "All the Notes" captures in breezy fashion the unconventional stance of this media-shy modern musical genius, regarded as one of the true giants of post-war music. Seated at his beloved and battered piano in his Brooklyn brownstone the maestro holds court with frequent stentorian pronouncements on life, art and music.

This early travelogue film, made in a Kenyan train station, captures an impromptu musical performance. Some passengers eagerly join in while others sleep—blissfully unaware of the performance taking place around them.

When two buskers find themselves situated on the same busy street corner, a musical battle ensues when the musicians realise that the lively city isn't big enough for the both of them

Two young strangers meet in Naples and begin to flirt and dance in the street.

In 1989, a collective of young hip hop artists gathered at a health food café in South Central Los Angeles. Their mandate? To reject gang culture and expand the musical boundaries of hip hop. DuVernay's documentary chronicles the historic legacy of the Good Life Cafe — the open mic nights that became an L.A. institution, the eclectic array of talented young MCs that emerged there, the alternative hip hop movement they developed, and their worldwide influence on the artform.

A stop motion/collaged based independent short film plays with the recontextualisation of memories and how time distorts them.

Filmed in Chicago & finished in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race - a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, foreseeing the civil unrest of subsequent decades, it also features the only known footage of visionary pianist Sun Ra from his beloved Chicago period. Featured are ample images of tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and the rest of Ra's Arkestra in Windy City nightclubs, all shot in glorious black & white.