15-20 years ago, I found a 2-DVD set called "Improvisation" that included both '50 and '44 material, a lot of interviews, and video of late '70s performances by Basie, Duke, Ella, and others in Europe.
I've done enough sound mixing for TV broadcast of jazz to agree that all of the observations about the difficulty of recording good sound with film or video are real. But there's another issue that greatly adds to the difficulty -- the refusal of the director to allow placement of a sufficient number of suitable microphones to overcome those limitations and allow good musical balance. Those limitations are entirely reasonable for material like feature films, but can be badly misguided when interviews and musical performance are the primary content. Directors of such presentations who "don't want to see any microphones" should close their eyes!
And don't get me started on directors who go to extended shots of passing traffic, the audience, the community where the music is being performed are suitable content while music that is the subject is being performed! Video direction of The Sound of Jazz was wonderful -- the shots of Basie in the curve of the piano digging Monk and of Billie digging Prez were perfect, but part of that perfection was that they were brief!
If only the Montreal CBC TV show of Bird could be found ~~~
15-20 years ago, I found a 2-DVD set called "Improvisation" that included both '50 and '44 material, a lot of interviews, and video of late '70s performances by Basie, Duke, Ella, and others in Europe.
I've done enough sound mixing for TV broadcast of jazz to agree that all of the observations about the difficulty of recording good sound with film or video are real. But there's another issue that greatly adds to the difficulty -- the refusal of the director to allow placement of a sufficient number of suitable microphones to overcome those limitations and allow good musical balance. Those limitations are entirely reasonable for material like feature films, but can be badly misguided when interviews and musical performance are the primary content. Directors of such presentations who "don't want to see any microphones" should close their eyes!
And don't get me started on directors who go to extended shots of passing traffic, the audience, the community where the music is being performed are suitable content while music that is the subject is being performed! Video direction of The Sound of Jazz was wonderful -- the shots of Basie in the curve of the piano digging Monk and of Billie digging Prez were perfect, but part of that perfection was that they were brief!