Racist Film
Wow, I'm stunned. I had no idea that this was going to be such a blatantly racist reconstruction of history. I felt like turning it off halfway through, but being one who feels that you must watch a movie through before you can make valid criticisms, I stuck it out. It only got worse.
If you didn't know anything about jazz, you would conclude that 100% of Blue Note artists were black, that blacks were 100% responsible for all of jazz, and that we should worship them as gods, geniuses, "Beethovens", etc.
Seriously, there was not one photo, not one interview, not even one passing reference to any white artists who have recorded for Blue Note. I guess musicians like Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Chick Corea, Pepper Adams, Jim Hall, Phil Woods, Tal Farlow (and about 100 others) are too obscure to be worth mentioning, eh?
With a couple of small exceptions, the only white faces that even appeared in the movie were Europeans, Alfred Lion's wives, some record executives ... and Andre Previn, who has never recorded a thing for Blue Note. Rather than include a single word from any white Blue Note artists, they chose to include a lot of words from jazz experts like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Carlos Santana.
They even went so far as to claim that jazz was successful in America *only* because of Europeans, immigrants, Jews, and more Jews (and of course, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who were portrayed as European immigrants rather than Americans). This movie was obviously produced by, and populated with, white-America-hating Europeans.
As a jazz fan, I thought the music was great, but the movie production was transparently racist and asinine.