Directed by Jake Meginsky with Neil Young • 2018 • United States
Starring Milford Graves
This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement—all just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle, and survival, ruminates on the essence of “swing,” activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan to perform at a school for children with autism. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm, and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’s music.
Up Next in Free Jazz
-
Fire Music
Directed by Tom Surgal • 2021 • United States
Starring John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun RaAlthough the free-jazz movement of the 1960s and ’70s was met with heated controversy, its pioneers—brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane—are toda...
-
Promises: Through Congress
Directed by Trevor Tweeten • 2021 • United States
Sound and image meet in a mesmerizing, multisensory experience in this journey through Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu’s expansive painting “Congress,” which sets the artwork to the acclaimed album “Promises,” a collaboration between elec...
-
The Cry of Jazz
Directed by Edward Bland • 1959 • United States
Starring George Waller, Dorothea Horton, Melinda DillonFeaturing music by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, this landmark semi-documentary explores—via a heated conversation between a group of Black and white jazz aficionados—the relationship between jazz ...
