The story, sound, and soul of a nation come together in the most American of art forms: Jazz. Ken Burns, who riveted the nation with The Civil War and Baseball, celebrates the music's soaring achievements, from its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop, and fusion. Six years in the making, this "soundbreaking" series blends 75 interviews, more than 500 pieces of music, ...
Rudolph is legendary for saving Christmas, but did you know he saved the New Year as well? While Santa Claus is recuperating from his December sleigh ride, he receives a letter from an old friend, Father Time. Seems that Baby New Year is missing, and if the little tyke isn't found, Old Year will continue on forever--a catastrophe for Father Time, whose job it is to keep things moving forward. A ...
This classic 1964 television special featuring Rudolph and his misfit buddies set the standard for stop-motion animation for an entire generation before Tim Burton darkly reinvented it in the early 1990s. Burl Ives narrates as Sam the Snowman, telling and singing the story of a rejected reindeer who overcomes prejudice and saves Christmas one particularly blustery year. Along the way, he meets an ...
This classic 1964 television special featuring Rudolph and his misfit buddies set the standard for stop-motion animation for an entire generation before Tim Burton darkly reinvented it in the early 1990s. Burl Ives narrates as Sam the Snowman, telling and singing the story of a rejected reindeer who overcomes prejudice and saves Christmas one particularly blustery year. Along the way, he meets an ...
The jaunty rhythms of Irving Berlin drive Alexander's Ragtime Band, an epic musical from 1938 that follows the up-and-down romance of a young bandleader (Tyrone Power, Witness for the Prosecution) and the singer he loves (Alice Faye, Tin Pan Alley) over decades. Their journey from a San Francisco honky-tonk to mass popularity is marked by classic songs like "Oh How I Hate ...
In 1996, with his public image at a low ebb after a messy breakup with Mia Farrow, clarinetist and filmmaker Woody Allen set off on a tour of Europe with his New Orleans jazz band. Accompanying him were his sister, his soon-to-be wife Soon-Yi Previn, and Oscar-winning documentary maker Barbara Kopple. Like Allen says as the beginning of the tour, "Theoretically, this should be fun for us." ...
John Coltrane is easily one of the key innovators, visionaries, and virtuosos of American Jazz. Coltrane's spiritually influenced and challenging music not only turned the jazz world upside down in the 1960s, but directly impacted all modern music for decades to follow. It is this relationship between music and spirituality that is the core of John Coltrane: The World According to John ...
Diana Ross stars as legendary blues singer Billie Holiday in this biopic that chronicles her rise and fall. It begins with her late childhood, a stint as a prostitute, those early days as a blues singer, her marriages, and her drug addiction. Overly glossy and lacking depth, this is worth seeing only for the performances. Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar for her acting debut. A dynamo with ...