Top billed cast
Joëlle LéandreJoëlle Léandre
Similar to Duende: Joëlle Léandre solo
Sunny's Time Now (2008)
Retracing the longstanding career of avant-garde drummer Sunny Murray, one of the most influential figures of the Free jazz revolution. Through a series of interviews with key time witnesses as well as historic and contemporary concert footage, it reassesses the relationship between the libertarian music movement and the political events of the 1960s, whose social claims it so intimately reflected. By doing so, it also recounts how the most radical forms of musical expression were excluded from the major production and distribution networks as the libertarian ideal went out of fashion. Beyond its historical approach, the film follows Sunny Murray on current gigs, showing his daily struggle to perpetuate a musical genre which is still widely ignored by the general public. In doing so, Sunny's time now also dwells on the near-clandestine community of aficionados who continue to worship the gods of their musical coming of age, and whose unfaltering support has permitted free ...

Waiting for Guffman (1997)
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.

Thick Air (2020)
An experimental music ensemble is recording an album. They want a very specific sound: the sound of thick air. The sound engineer struggles to understand and to find that sound. A tale of sleepless nights and loud music, a noise-injected collage composed of diaristic footage, a found narrative (memories of a popular 60s band), original music and field recordings.

Fire Music (2021)
Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and '70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers - brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane - are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America's most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane's Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement's key players.
Mike Garson and His 88 Friends (2019)
An intimate documentary portrait of world-class improvisational and traditional pianist Mike Garson as he tours, performs, and teaches.
The Cry of Jazz (1959)
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.
Cecil Taylor: All The Notes (2005)
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.

Fainting Flicker (2016)
Two young strangers meet in Naples and begin to flirt and dance in the street.

Ornette: Made in America (1986)
Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.
AFIJN (Misha Mengelberg) (2006)
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.

Lenine: MTV Unplugged (2006)
Recorded at Auditório Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo , on 24 and 25 June 2006 , the album features the biggest hits singer-songwriter Lenine's career such as "Paciência" (Patience), "Jack Soul Brasileiro" (Since I am Brazilian), "Na Pressão" (On The Pressure), "A Rede" (The Net), "Hoje Eu Quero Sair Só" (I Want Go Out Alone, Today) and "A Medida da Paixão" (The Measure of Passion), plus new songs like "Tudo Por Acaso" (All By Chance). The album features special participations from musicians such as the Chilean Victor Astorga (the first English horn soloist with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra), Cameroonian bassist and singer Richard Bona, Mexican singer Julieta Venegas, harpist Cristina Braga, the rapper Gog, and drummer Iggor Cavalera (ex-member of Sepultura). The DVD includes bonus material, plus making-of scenes, reviews, testimonials about the project, the guests and also footage of the 2006 World Cup, since the performance was recorded concurrently with it.

This Is the Life (2008)
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.
John Coltrane Quartet: Live in Liège (1965)
The bold and ferocious harmonic imagination of John Coltrane is laid bare in this concert, captured at the Comblain-La-Tour Festival in Belgium, 1965. Alongside his famed quartet, he delivers a transcendent performance that is marked by the total physicality of the music – four sets of hands moving with restless vigour as vapour literally rises from their shoulders and into the night sky.

The Ghost (2024)
Two college students set out to capture a ghost on film to make millions instead of doing their finals.
We Don't Care About Music Anyway (2009)
From radical turntablism (Otomo Yoshihide) to laptop music innovation (Numb), via classical instrument hijacking (Sakamoto Hiromichi), Tokyo's avant-garde music scene is internationally known for its boldness. While introducing some of the greatest musicians of this scene, "We Don't Care About Music Anyway..." offers a kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo, confronting music and noise, sound and image, reality and representation, documentary and fiction.

Streetlight Opus (2023)
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
You See What I’m Trying To Say? (1967)
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)

The Making of Basement 626 (2025)
In January 2025, experimental jazz duo Myshko Birchenko and Yevhen Puhachov, members of Hyphen Dash, travelled to Kramatorsk without any pre-made drafts or demo recordings to use music as a vessel to capture the emotions present in a place on the edge of a battle for survival and explore the therapeutic nature of music and improvisation in the brutal reality of war. They packed all the equipment into a car, drove 700 kilometres from Kyiv to the frontline city Kramatorsk, and turned one of many basements which serve as shelters into a makeshift recording studio. As a result, they recorded over 300 minutes of music, which were eventually distilled into a 90-minute album.
Blue For a Moment (2017)
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.
Sonny Sharrock Band - Lucerna Hall Prague 4.10.90
The Sonny Sharrock Band live in Prague as part of the Knitting Factory Festival Tour of Europe 1990.