Sights of the sounds

Cinematheque celebrates jazz fest with genre-hopping mini series

Advertisement

Advertise with us

For some mysterious reason, many documentary filmmakers seem to be deeply attracted to jazz. Perhaps it’s because the two arts inform one another. Like jazz, a doc can be conventional, classic, free-form or wildly experimental.

Read this article for free:


By clicking the button above, an account will be created and you will begin to receive some of our recommended newsletters. You may opt out of any newsletter by visiting your Email and Communication Preferences page or by clicking "unsubscribe" at the bottom of any email.

or

Already have an account? Log in here »

To continue reading, please subscribe:

Digital Subscription

One year of digital access for only $1.44 a week*

  • Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
  • Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
  • Access News Break, our award-winning app
  • Play interactive puzzles

*Billed as $5.77 plus GST every four weeks. After 52 weeks, price increases to the regular rate of $19.95 plus GST every four weeks. Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.

To continue reading, please subscribe:

Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional

$1 for the first 4 weeks*

  • Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
  • Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
  • Access News Break, our award-winning app
  • Play interactive puzzles
Start now

*Your next Brandon Sun subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $17.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2019 (2689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For some mysterious reason, many documentary filmmakers seem to be deeply attracted to jazz. Perhaps it’s because the two arts inform one another. Like jazz, a doc can be conventional, classic, free-form or wildly experimental.

In any case, jazz and docs go together like cartoons and mice, rom-coms and coincidences, slasher movies and summer camps. And the love affair continues in Cinematheque’s annual mini-fest of music-themed films screened to coincide with the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival.

On this year’s program:

Supplied
Blue Note Records is responsible for putting out some of the most important jazz ever released.
Supplied Blue Note Records is responsible for putting out some of the most important jazz ever released.

 

Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes

(Thursday, June 20 at 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, June 22 and 23 at 3 p.m.)

Director Sophie Huber offers a peek behind the venerable facade of Blue Note Records, a label that hosted some of the most challenging, cutting-edge jazz greats, including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Art Blakey.

This 85-minute film explores that heritage, but also how Blue Note moved into the 21st century, incorporating hip-hop into the jazz mix, most famously in the release of the 2003 cut Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) by Us3, which sampled Herbie Hancock’s 1964 track Cantaloupe Island, becoming a huge hit.

Hancock is one of the interviewees in this film, along with expert witnesses such as Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest), Robert Glasper, Wayne Shorter and Norah Jones.

 

 

Carmine Street Guitars

(Saturday and Sunday, June 22 and 23 at 5 p.m.; Wednesday, June 26 at 9 p.m.; Thursday, June 27 at 7 p.m.)

Canadian director Ron Mann (Comic Book Confidential, Grass) shot this loving 80-minute portrait of a Greenwich Village shop operated by custom guitar maker Rick Kelly and his young apprentice Cindy Hulej. Kelly and Hulej build handcrafted guitars out of wood reclaimed from old hotels, bars, churches and other local buildings.

Shot from the perspective of a guy hanging out at the store, the film features guitar performances and stories from a cool cast of players and artists, including Jim Jarmusch, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot and Kirk Douglas (of the Roots… as opposed to Kirk Douglas of Spartacus).

 

 

Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

(Thursday, June 20 at 9 p.m.; Saturday, June 22 at 9 p.m.; Sunday, June 23 at 7 p.m.)

Director Steve Loveridge’s 96-minute film is an extensive look at the life and career of M.I.A., an artist whose startling past (she is the daughter of the founder of Sri Lanka’s armed Tamil resistance, was a refugee and eventually an art student) all informs her current identity as a hip-hop recording artist.

 

Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story

(Friday, June 21 at 9 p.m.; Saturday, June 22 at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, June 26 at 7 p.m.; Thursday, June 27 at 9 p.m.)

This 95-minute doc from director John Anderson explores the life and career of legendary blues man Paul Butterfield, following him from his origins as a white, teenage harmonica player from Chicago’s south side, where he learned from the original black masters (including his lifelong friend, Muddy Waters) performing on his own home turf. Butterfield, who died in 1987 at the age of 44, is remembered by interview subjects, including Elvin Bishop, BB King and Todd Rundgren. Tickets to each screening are $10.

— Randall King

Report Error Submit a Tip

More Stories

Cabbie, passenger dead after Salter Street collision

Free Press staff 2 minute read Preview

Cabbie, passenger dead after Salter Street collision

Free Press staff 2 minute read Updated: 5:46 PM CDT

Two men died in a Wednesday morning collision between a taxi and a sedan on Salter Street near Aberdeen Avenue, police said Thursday.

Winnipeg Police Service officers were sent to the intersection at about 6:30 a.m., where they found the cab driver, a man in his 40s, and his passenger, a man in his 50s, in critical condition. Paramedics took the men to hospital, where they later died.

The sedan driver, a woman in her late teens, and an adult passenger, had minor injuries.

Traffic investigators believe the sedan was travelling west on Aberdeen when it collided with the cab that was southbound on Salter.

Read
Updated: 5:46 PM CDT

Election results: School trustees 2026

Staff 1 minute read Preview

Election results: School trustees 2026

Staff 1 minute read Friday, Oct. 23, 2026

Below you’ll find live 2026 election results for school trustees in Winnipeg divisions.

We can display results only for wards in which Winnipeg voters cast a ballot; we do not have access to live results reporting for school boards outside of Winnipeg.

 

Read
Friday, Oct. 23, 2026

‘Women were shortchanged.’ Why bobsledding’s idea of equality doesn’t add up

Kerry Gillespie - Sports Reporter, Toronto Star 7 minute read Preview

‘Women were shortchanged.’ Why bobsledding’s idea of equality doesn’t add up

Kerry Gillespie - Sports Reporter, Toronto Star 7 minute read Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021

When female bobsledders pushed for an Olympic four-woman event, they got a solo discipline instead: monobob. Now they’ll race for the same number of medals as men, but with fewer sledders. Not the progress they were looking for.

Read
Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021

Waiting for Cormier verdict the ‘calm before the storm’

Katie May 6 minute read Preview

Waiting for Cormier verdict the ‘calm before the storm’

Katie May 6 minute read Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018

As the jury room door closed behind the seven women and four men who are now deliberating on the evidence against Tina Fontaine’s accused killer, Thelma Favel rose from the chair she’s occupied for most of Raymond Cormier’s second-degree murder trial.

Almost every day over the past three weeks, Favel, the woman who raised 15-year-old Tina, has sat right up front, directly across from the jury box, listening, sobbing and soaking in disturbing details of the teen’s last days that have come to light over the course of Cormier’s second-degree murder trial.

On Wednesday afternoon, after Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal instructed the jury and sent them off to be sequestered until they decide whether 56-year-old Raymond Cormier is guilty of killing Tina, Favel got up and hugged Crown prosecutor Breta Passler. It was one of many moments, this one shielded from jurors, that have long since proven the emotional impact of the case and the lasting power of Tina’s legacy.

Tina’s death sparked a public outcry that renewed calls for a national inquiry into disproportionately high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada, and the criminal trial for the man accused of killing her hasn’t happened in a vacuum.

Read
Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018

Three in-custody fatalities trigger inquests

Free Press staff 2 minute read Preview

Three in-custody fatalities trigger inquests

Free Press staff 2 minute read 1:50 PM CDT

The province’s chief medical examiner has called inquests into the deaths of three men, including two who died by suicide in correctional facilities earlier this year.

Craig Flett, 32, was found hanging in his cell in the Stony Mountain Institution prison on Feb. 10 this year.

Corrections officers were able to cut him down and tried to resuscitate him, but he later died of a brain injury. Flett was serving a life sentence at the time.

Sebastian Atkinson, a 25-year-old inmate at the Winnipeg Remand Centre, was found hanging in his cell by a linen sheet tied to a metal bar about five feet from the floor.

Read
1:50 PM CDT

Moving past the Indian Act will take time and trust

Niigaan Sinclair 5 minute read Preview

Moving past the Indian Act will take time and trust

Niigaan Sinclair 5 minute read 4:52 PM CDT

If I had a dime for every time a politician has called for the “abolishment”of the Indian Act, I’d be a rich man.

OK, maybe I’d have enough coins to jingle loudly in my pocket.

My point: a Canadian leader calling for the end of the race-based law passed in 1867 that is designed to give the federal government broad and brutal control over First Nations governments, membership, and reserve land is nothing new.

Premier Wab Kinew became the latest to advocate for this, during the First Nations-first ministers meeting in Ottawa this week.

Read
4:52 PM CDT