'Do we get stupider as we grow up?' In his wildly popular Broadway show American Utopia, David Byrne reflects on human connections, life and how on earth we work through it. He joins the dots with his music and it all starts making sense. Spike Lee here transforms the production into immersive, dynamic cinema that radiates with astounding performances, inventive contemporary dance and political urgency. American Utopia flows like an iridescent dream vision. Work by James Baldwin, Janelle Monáe and Kurt Schwitters is highlighted among exhilarating renditions of Byrne's solo work, as well as Talking Heads classics. According to the multi-hyphenate, we love looking at humans more than anything else. Anti-fascist and anti-racist, Byrne illuminates our responsibility to care for one another as he and his co-performers burn down the house.
The Newport Jazz Festival was created in 1954 by Rhode Island socialites Elaine and Louis Lorillard, and it couldn't have come at a better time in history. With a few exceptions, the big band jazz scene had waned in the early 1950s and, in its place, smaller groups and solo performers took centre stage, which suited the nature of a festival perfectly, and Newport achieved immediate success. By its fifth edition, the talent lineup reflected Newport's status as one of the pre-eminent music festivals in the US. Photographer Bert Stern and director-editor Aram Avakian's film of the 1958 iteration of the festival captures many of the key performances across its four-day affair. Performers included Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan and Art Farmer, Chico Hamilton and Eric Dolphy, Anita O'Day, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong and the extraordinary Mahalia Jackson, who would go on to give one of the most moving performances at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, featured in the documentary of that event, Summer of Soul. A key element of Jazz on a Summer's Day, which would come to inspire subsequent concert films, was its focus on the audience. Through cutaways interspersed throughout the performances, the filmmakers present a time capsule of the US as it edged towards the New Frontier of the Kennedy era. It was this moment - the hope of change - that so many jazz artists had been pushing towards. The resulting combination of performance and observation makes Jazz on a Summer's Day one of the greatest concert documentaries ever made.
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