Review: ‘Music by John Williams,’ starring John Williams, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy and Chris Columbus

December 29, 2024

by Carla Hay

John Williams in “Music by John Williams” (Photo by Travers Jacobs/Lucasfilm/Disney+)

“Music by John Williams”

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau

Culture Representation: Filmed in 2023, mostly in the United States, the documentary film “Music by John Williams” features award-winning music composer John Willams and a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans, Latin people and Asians) who are his friends, colleagues or family members talking about Williams’ life and career.

Culture Clash: Williams started off as a jazz musician and classical music orchestra player but transitioned into become the most famous and most-awarded movie composer of all time.

Culture Audience: “Music by John Williams” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Williams and the movies he composed music for, including “Star Wars,” “E.T.,” the “Indiana Jones” films, and the first three “Harry Potter” movies.

John Williams in “Music by John Williams” (Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+)

The tribute documentary “Music by John Williams” gives an admirable career retrospective of the world’s most famous movie composer. John Williams and his colleague friends provide most of the commentary in a formulaic but educational and delightful film. Even the most ardent fans of Williams will see or learn something new from seeing this well-researched documentary. “Music by John Williams” had its world premiere at the 2024 edition of AFI Fest.

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, “Music by John Williams” is the type of documentary that would be hard get wrong, considering the subject matter and the participation of all the immensely talented people (including Williams) in this film. Born in New York City in 1932, Williams has an extraordinary body of work that includes composing the iconic scores for numerous high-profile films, including “Star Wars” movies, the “Indiana Jones” movies, 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extraterrestrial,” 1993’s “Schindler’s List,” 1998’s “Saving Private Ryan” and the first three “Harry Potter” movies.

Williams has won every major award for film music composing (including several Oscars and Grammys) and has earned the description of being a “legendary” composer. “Music by John Williams” has the expected descriptions of Williams’ most famous movie scores with clips from these films and some anecdotal stories. As such, “Music by John Williams” is very much a nostalgia documentary, but it’s also an inspirational story of someone who refuses to follow the conventions that most people follow when it comes to aging and retirement.

“Music by John Williams” tells Williams’ story in chronological order and includes personal photos of Williams in his youth. Williams is candid about his experiences but mostly talks about his career, his compositions and the fondness he has for his colleague friends. He came from a family of musicians and creative people: His father Johnny was a drummer/percussionist, his mother Esther was a dancer, and his younger brothers Jerry and Don and older sister Joan also had musical talent and became musicians. Williams’ three children—daughter Jenny, son Mark and son Joe—also became musicians. (For the purposes of this review, John Williams will be referred to as Williams.)

Williams describes having a happy childhood, which is when he taught himself a lot of what he knows about music through constant practicing. By the time he was in high school, he was writing music for the school’s orchestra. Williams describes this accomplishment in such a modest way, it’s almost easy to forget that most high schoolers wouldn’t be able and wouldn’t be asked to write music for their school orchestra.

In his late teens and 20s, Williams studied music while he attended the University of California at Los Angeles, Juilliard, and the University of Rochester. For a brief time, he was in the U.S. Air Force. When he relocated permanently to Los Angeles, Williams became a session musician for many movies and TV shows from the mid-1950s onward. He worked with mentors such as Harry Mancini and André Previn. Some of Williams’ film credits during this time included 1956’s Carousel, 1959’s “Peter Gunn” and 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Williams also became known as a jazz musician. And it wasn’t long before he was composing and conducting his own film and TV scores. Some his TV credits in the 1960s included “Gilligan’s Island” and “Lost in Space.” His first movie score as a composer was the 1958 forgettable flop “Daddy-O.” It’s an example of how Williams didn’t let any early career failures deter him.

Because so much of Williams’ best-known music is in movies directed and/or produced by Steven Spielberg, it should come as no surprise that Spielberg is one of the producers of “Music by John Williams” and is one of the enthusiastic commentators in the documentary. As Williams says in the documentary, the “luckiest day” of his life was meeting Spielberg, who has worked with Williams for all of the feature films directed by Spielberg so far. In the documentary, Spielberg gushes about Williams’ music: “It’s the purest form of art I’ve experienced from any human being.”

Other filmmakers who are interviewed for the documentary are “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, Ron Howard, Kathleen Kennedy, Chris Columbus, Lawrence Kasdan, James Mangold and Frank Marshall. Musicians who pay homage to Williams in this documentary include Chris Martin (lead singer of Coldplay), Branford Marsalis, David Newman, Thomas Newman, Alan Silvestri, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gustavo Dudamel, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Thomas Hooten and Master Sergeant Karen Johnson of the U.S. Marines Chamber Orchestra. Other interviewees include actress Kate Capshaw, actor Ke Huy Quan and journalists Alex Ross, Elvis Mitchell and Javier Hernandez. Williams’ daughter Jenny and her singer/musician son Ethan Gruska are also interviewed.

The commentators for the documentary have nothing but praise for Williams as an artist and as a person. Spielberg says his first impression of Williams is who Williams remained for all of these years: “He was an elegant man—always has been—but very warm.” Williams gets absolutely no criticism in this movie, which makes him look almost too good to be true.

However, observant viewers will notice that if there’s one major flaw that Williams seems to have is that he’s a workaholic who has often put his career above his personal life. This not-very-surprising revelation comes directly from Williams. He describes how although he was a happily married father during his marriage to actress/singer Barbara Ruick (his first wife, whom he married in 1956), when their three kinds were young, he deliberately spent more time at the music studios of 20th Century Fox than he did at home because being around his kids at home was too much of a noisy distraction for him.

Williams’ daughter Jenny is the only one of his children who is interviewed in the documentary. She doesn’t mention how her father’s absences affected her childhood but she does say that she had to become a mother figure for her younger brothers after their mother tragically died at age 41 of an aneurysm in 1974. Williams says in the documentary that her sudden death is still hard for him to talk about, and he admits he had problems handling being a widowed father of teenagers. Williams and photographer Samantha Winslow (who is not interviewed in the documentary) got married in 1980, and he briefly mentions their happy marriage in the documentary.

One of the most poignant parts of the documentary is when Williams says that he believes that his music improved during this widower part of his life because he felt that Ruick (in spirit) was helping him be a better composer. The phenomenal success of the 1977 “Star Wars” score soundtrack catapulted Williams to a new level of fame. He has been performing at the Hollywood Bowl every year since 1978 and has been a Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor at Tanglewood Music Center every year since 1980, except for 2024, when he could not attend for an undisclosed health reason. As for his prolific career as a composer and conductor, Williams says that he has no intention of retiring.

“Music by John Williams” has scenes (exclusively filmed for this documentary) of Spielberg and Williams happily reminiscing about their collaborations. Spielberg repeats a well-known story about how he was skeptical at first when he heard the shark theme for “Jaws” because Williams had first played it on a piano, and Spielberg didn’t think it sounded menacing enough. However, Spielberg was convinced nce he hear the entire musical sequence in orchestra form.

Speaking of orchestras, Williams is one of the few major film composers who still records entirely with an orchestra and writes out his music by hand. He admits that this way of writing and recording film music is “dying,” as more film composers turn to digital technology. Williams doesn’t seem snobbish about it, but he does express some concern that some of the art form might be lost with new generations of film composers relying only on digital technology to make and record music.

At 105 minutes, “Music by John Williams” skillfully packs in Williams’ entire robust career so far in a well-edited compilation of archival footage and exclusive new interviews. There are very few surprises, except for Williams’ confession that he rarely watches movies and has never been that interested in being a moviegoer. What isn’t surprising is Williams saying that music will always be his biggest passion. Whether or not you’re the type of person to buy classical music scores, “Music by John Williams” makes his passion for music very infectious in the best ways possible.

Disney+ released “Music by John Williams” in select U.S. cinemas and on Disney+ on November 1, 2024.

Review: ‘The Beach Boys,’ starring Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston and David Marks

May 26, 2024

by Carla Hay

A 1964 photo of the Beach Boys in “The Beach Boys.” Pictured from left to right: Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson and Mike Love. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images/Disney+)

“The Beach Boys”

Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny

Culture Representation: The documentary film “The Beach Boys” features a predominantly white group of people (with two black people) from the music industry discussing the career and legacy of the Beach Boys, the California-based pop/rock band that rose to prominence in the 1960s.

Culture Clash: The Beach Boys had various conflicts inside and outside the band on the band’s musical direction, touring, business decisions, mental health, substance addiction and power struggles.

Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the obvious target audience of Beach Boys fans, “The Beach Boys” will appeal primarily to people who like watching celebrity biographies that have a lot of great archival footage but follow a familiar formula.

A 1966 photo from “The Beach Boys” of Beach Boys chief songwriter/producer Brian Wilson recording the album “Pet Sounds” in Los Angeles. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images/Disney+)

Ardent fans of the band will learn nothing new from “The Beach Boys” documentary, which plays it safe but is a very good introduction for viewers who don’t know much about the Beach Boys. The movie’s ending scene indicates a better story could’ve been told. That’s because at the end of the movie, there’s a very short scene of a band reunion with five surviving Beach Boys members (past and present) gathering to talk on the beach at Paradise Cove in Malibu, California, where the Beach Boys did the photo shoot for their 1962 debut album “Surfin’ Safari.”

“The Beach Boys” documentary purposely doesn’t show what was said during this reunion and only shows some of the men smiling and embracing each other before they sit down at a table on the beach. It’s an example of how the documentary is certainly competent when it comes to giving a history of the Beach Boys, but the documentary would have been more impactful if it had anything new that was truly exclusive and compelling. Showing this type of heavily edited reunion clip at the very end of the movie just seems like a tease that will give viewers the impression that the documentary left out some of the best parts of the Beach Boys’ story.

Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, “The Beach Boys” is one of several biographical movies or TV series about the Beach Boys. This documentary can be considered a quasi-update of director Alan Boyd’s 1998 documentary film “Endless Harmony: The Beach Boys Story,” which did not have the participation of the surviving band members. Some other Beach Boys on-screen biographies are the 1990 TV-movie drama “Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys” and the 2000 drama mini-series “The Beach Boys: An American Family.”

Curiously, “The Beach Boys” 2024 documentary has very little details about the band members’ lives after the early 1980s. For example, the band’s 1988 massive comeback hit “Kokomo” is not discussed and only played during the movie’s end credits. However, because “The Beach Boys” documentary has the benefit of the participation of the band members who were alive at the time this documentary was filmed, it makes this documentary slightly better than most movies about the Beach Boys.

“The Beach Boys” documentary dutifully covers the origins of the band, which was formed in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. The original and best-known lineup of the band consisted of brothers Brian Wilson (the eldest brother), who was the band’s chief songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, playing bass guitar or keyboards on stage; Dennis Wilson (the middle brother), who was the band’s drummer; Carl Wilson (the youngest brother), who was the band’s lead guitarist; Mike Love, the Wilson brothers’ first cousin and lead singer of the band; and rhythm guitarist Al Jardine, a longtime family friend.

The Wilson brothers’ parents—Murry Wilson and Audree Wilson—encouraged and supported the band. Murry became the first manager of the Beach Boys. By all accounts, Murry was tough, bullying and abusive. (Murry’s physical and emotional abuse of his sons is briefly mentioned in archival interview footage with Carl and Dennis.) However, people who talk about Murry in the documentary also agree that the Beach Boys probably wouldn’t have achieved the level of success that they had if not for Murry. Eventually, a major problem for the band was Murry’s constant interference in how he wanted the band’s music to sound.

The Beach Boys had an image of being a carefree California pop/rock band with distinctive harmonies. The Beach Boys experienced almost immediate success with their first single “Surfin’,” which became a hit on a Los Angeles radio station, which led to bigger opportunities for the band. Many of the Beach Boys’ biggest hits were about surfing (“Surfin’,” “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ USA”) or about the California lifestyle. The band’s earliest musical influences included the Four Freshmen and surf music artists such as Dick Dale.

Even though the Beach Boys were initially rejected by every major record company, they eventually signed with Capitol Records, with Nick Venet as the band’s A&R (artists and repertoire) executive from Capitol. Venet started off producing the early Beach Boys records until Brian Wilson took over as the chief producer during the height of the group’s success. Murry acted like he wanted to be a producer for the band too, and that led to inevitable major conflicts.

Each member of the band had a certain role that was part of the Beach Boys image. Brian Wilson was the “musical genius” who didn’t like to tour. Love was the extroverted lead singer who was band’s jokester with a huge ego. Dennis Wilson (the only member of the Beach Boys who was an enthusiastic surfer) was the rebellious heartthrob. Carl Wilson was the “shy and quiet one.” Jardine was the “regular guy” who was often the peacemaker.

“The Beach Boys” documentary has the expected archival footage and use of the band’s original songs. Most of the band’s biggest hits from the 1960s are included, such as the aforementioned “Surf” songs, “Help Me, Rhonda,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “California Girls,” “I Get Around,” “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B.” The documentary’s best archival footage (audio and video) is of the recording sessions, particularly when it shows how these recordings took shape.

During the heyday of the Beach Boys’ 1960s commercial success, they were heavily influenced by the music created by music producer Phil Spector (who was famous for his Wall of Sound) and the Beatles. The Beatles’ 1965 “Rubber Soul” album influenced the Beach Boys’ 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” which in turn influenced the Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The rivalries and the influences that the Beach Boys and the Beatles had on each other are detailed in the documentary, but there is no new information revealed.

The documentary and band members give a lot of credit to the Wrecking Crew, the influential group of studio musicians who played on a lot of iconic music of the 1960s and 1970s. Don Randi of the Wrecking Crew is interviewed for this documentary, which also has archival interview clips from Wrecking Crew members Carol Kaye and Glen Campbell, who was briefly a member of the Beach Boys. Other collaborators, such as lyricist Van Dyke Parks (who worked on the Beach Boys’ previously unreleased “Smile” album from the late 1960s), are seen in archival clips.

The Beach Boys had various lineup changes over the years. Brian Wilson and Jardine quit and rejoined the band multiple times for various reasons. One of the people who is interviewed in the documentary is David Marks, a neighbor friend of the Wilson brothers, who replaced Jardine in the band for a few years after Jardine quit the band for the first time in 1961.

There have been several reasons cited for why Jardine quit the Beach Boys for the first time, with the reasons ranging from creative differences to apathy to wanting to finish his college education. In the “Beach Boys” documentary Jardine says he quit the band in the early 1960s because he wanted to finish his college education. Jardine rejoined the band in 1963, replacing Marks, who quit after getting into a big dispute with Murry Wilson.

In 1965, guitarist Bruce Johnston joined the Beach Boys as a replacement for Campbell, who went on to have a successful career as a solo artist. Johnston takes some issue with the widespread public perception of Brian Wilson being the most important member of the Beach Boys. In the documentary, Johnston says, “Brian was lucky to have our voices to sing his dreams.” Out of all of the surviving Beach Boys members who participated in this documentary, Brian is the one who has the least to say in new interview footage. Most of the documentary’s comments from Brian are from archival interviews from other sources.

South African musicians Blondie Chaplin (who is interviewed in the documentary) and Ricky Fataar joined the Beach Boys in the band’s more experimental early 1970s era. Chaplin doesn’t say much in the documentary except that the Beach Boys’ music had a harder-edged sound when he was in the band, and the band situation “wasn’t that great” during this period of time. The documentary mentions the Beach Boys’ declining popularity in the first half of the 1970s got a significant boost with the release of the 1974 greatest hits compilation album “Endless Summer,” which was a big hit and made the Beach Boys a touring powerhouse that could sell out arenas again but also cemented their fate as a nostalgia act.

“The Beach Boys” is not a documentary where people should expect to hear much about the Beach Boys’ personal lives. The only current or former spouse of a Beach Boy who is interviewed in the documentary is Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford, who was Brian Wilson’s first wife and who was the president of Brother Records, the Beach Boys’ record label. The children of Beach Boys members are not interviewed.

Wilson-Rutherford tells the same stories she’s told in many interviews and books about the ups and downs that she witnessed or experienced as a member of the Beach Boys’ inner circle. Brian Wilson’s health problems (mental and physical), including substance addiction and depression, are also rehashed in the documentary, as they have been in many other biographies. This documentary provides no new insight on these issues. The only people who will be surprised by the information in this documentary are people who don’t know much about the Beach Boys.

One of the biggest flaws in the documentary is how it sidelines the deaths of Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson. In 1983, Dennis drowned while intoxicated in Marina del Rey, California, when he was 39. Carl died of lung cancer in 1998, when he was 51. The deaths of Dennis and Carl are not even mentioned in “The Beach Boys” documentary until the very end, when a caption is briefly flashed on screen with their names and the years of their births and deaths.

In other words, don’t expect anyone in this documentary to comment on how these deaths affected them. For a movie about a “family band” (a term Love uses more than once), it’s a glaring omission not to discuss the deaths of two of the family members in the band. The documentary also never mentions that at the time that Dennis died, he was homeless and had nearly been fired from the band because of his alcoholism. The other band members ordered Dennis to go to rehab, but he left rehab after a few days and then died. None of that information is in the documentary.

“The Beach Boys” documentary features interviews with some well-known music artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Janelle Monáe, Ryan Tedder and Don Was—but their comments really just amount to fan gushing and offer nothing new to say. Josh Kun, a former music critic and currently University of Southern California’s vice provost of the arts, gives the obligatory academic/historian perspective. One person who is noticeably absent from the documentary is actor John Stamos, who has been a close friend (and occasional touring musician) of the Beach Boys, beginning in the 1980s.

As for Beach Boys scandals, there’s a brief mention of Dennis Wilson introducing an aspiring musician named Charles Manson to the Beach Boys’ inner circle in the late 1960s. (The documentary doesn’t mention that Dennis let Manson and some of Manson’s cult members live at a house rented by Dennis, who moved out and eventually got the Manson people evicted by no longer paying the rent.) Lead singer Love says in the documentary that he only met Manson once, and that was enough for him not to get further involved. Still, Manson wrote a Beach Boys song called “Never Learn Not to Love,” which was the B-side of the Beach Boys’ 1969 remake single of “Bluebirds Over the Mountain.”

Music producer Terry Melcher, whom Johnston describes as Johnston’s best friend at the time, declined to work with Manson, which led to a terrible aftermath that doesn’t need to be described in this review. The Beach Boys’ brief but notorious association with Manson is obviously described as a mistake in judgment, with the band members having no idea what Manson and his cult would end up doing. It’s quickly mentioned that Dennis Wilson felt tremendously guilty over introducing Manson into the Beach Boys’ world.

“The Beach Boys” documentary has an even shorter mention of all the lawsuits and legal disputes that Love has had with the Beach Boys in the 1980s and beyond. The documentary does not mention the controversy over Brian Wilson’s therapist Eugene Landy, who had an on-again/off-again, guru-like relationship with Brian from 1975 to the early 1990s, resulting in several lawsuits that involved the Beach Boys. (Landy died in 2006.) Beach Boys singer Love will only say in the documentary what is already public knowledge about his own Beach Boys legal conflicts: Love has been fighting for a share of royalties for Love’s uncredited songwriting of Beach Boys songs.

The Beach Boys lead singer bitterly comments in the documentary that Murry Wilson’s 1969 decision to sell the Beach Boys’ publishing (without consulting any of the band members first) has damaged the family’s legacy. Love, who says that he and Brian Wilson don’t talk very much these days, gets teary-eyed and chokes up when he remarks that if he would say something to Brian, it would be “I love you. And nothing anybody can do can change that.”

That’s why it’s incredibly frustrating that this documentary doesn’t show what was said in the reunion of Love, Brian Wilson, Jardine, Johnston and Marks seen at the end of the movie. There could almost be an entire documentary about that conversation. “The Beach Boys” gets the job done on an acceptable level when retelling well-known facts and putting them in a nostalgic package. Ultimately, it has the glossy sheen of a celebrity biography where all the key people participated but still didn’t tell the whole story.

Disney+ premiered “The Beach Boys” on May 24, 2024, with a sneak preview at select U.S. IMAX cinemas on May 21, 2024.

Review: ‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,’ starring George Wein, Quint Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Irma Thomas, Jimmy Buffett and Bruce Springsteen

May 16, 2022

by Carla Hay

Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire in “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” (Photo courtesy of The Kennedy/Marshall Company and Sony Pictures Classics)

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story”

Directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern

Culture Representation: Taking place in New Orleans, the documentary “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” features a cast of white and black people (with a few Latinos), mostly music artists, who are connected in some way to Jazz Fest, an annual music and cultural festival in New Orleans.

Culture Clash: Jazz Fest has had its share of obstacles, including overcoming racial segregation issues, Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Culture Audience: “Jazz Fest” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in this festival and its impact on New Orleans and pop culture.

Nashville Super Choir in “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” (Photo courtesy of The Kennedy/Marshall Company and Sony Pictures Classics)

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” is a purely laudatory documentary, told mostly from artists’ perspectives. The film is sometimes unfocused, and some of the commentary praise is too effusive, but the dynamic concert scenes make the movie a worthwhile watch. The movie capably demonstrates how Jazz Fest has become a necessary and influential cultural institution in New Orleans.

Directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” does nothing groundbreaking in how the film is presented. It’s a traditionally formatted documentary that blends archival footage with the movie’s exclusive interviews. “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” does an excellent job of showing the diversity of Jazz Fest, the commonly used name for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Despite its name, this beloved event isn’t just a festival for jazz music. Jazz Fest—an outdoor festival which traditionally takes place in the spring at Fair Grounds Race Course and Slots—also features R&B, rock, pop, country, gospel, blues, Latin music, Americana, world music, and a number of other music genres from numerous artists from around the world. Jazz Fest, which launched in 1970, is owned by the non-profit New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Foundation Inc. The event is produced by AEG Presents and Festival Productions Inc.-New Orleans.

Jazz Fest founder George Wein (who died in 2021, at age 95) is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. A longtime concert promoter, Wein says in the documentary that he was first approached to do Jazz Fest in 1962 by “someone from the Hotel Corporation of America” to do a “Newport [Jazz Festival] type of festival.” Wein said that because of Jim Crow laws at the time that made racial segregation legal in Louisiana, “I couldn’t have white musicians and African [black] musicians on stage at the same time.”

And so, Jazz Fest had to wait to launch only after the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed into law and ended legal racial segregation in the United States. Shell Oil Company signed on to be Jazz Fest’s first corporate sponsor. Jazz Fest’s first concert lineup in the event’s inaugural year included Mahalia Jackson, Duke Wellington, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, Clifton Chenier, Fats Domino, The Meters, and the Preservation Hall Band.

Jazz Fest received support from the artistic community from the beginning, although attendance from the public was very low by today’s Jazz Fest standards. In the first year of Jazz Fest, which took place in Congo Square in 1970, about 350 people attended. Since then, Jazz Fest has become the biggest annual concert event in New Orleans, with an estimated 425,000 to 475,000 people in attendance, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jazz Fest founding producer Quint Davis comments in the documentary: “When Jazz Fest started, it was like we were presenting this music to the world … There were a lot of reasons everybody thought we would fail. One of them was bringing Cajun people and Latin people together.”

Davis adds, “Well, everybody eats, and everybody dances. So, if we can get people together to see what they eat and see what they dance to, I think that can work. When it was all put together in one place, it was stunning to the local people. They were amazed at themselves and felt tremendous pride.”

One particular New Orleans family became integral to Jazz Fest: the Marsalis family, who are world-renowned for their musical accomplishments, particularly in jazz. Ellis Marsalis Jr. (who died in 2020, at age 85) and four of his six sons—Wynton, Branson, Delfeayo, and Jason—are interviewed in the documentary, and they share fond memories of performing at Jazz Fest. The Marsalis brothers literally grew up at Jazz Fest and frequently performed as part of the musical group called the Ellis Marsalis Family Tribute. Branford Marsalis comments on performing with his brothers and his father Ellis: “When we walked out on stage, he ceased being my dad. He was the leader of the group.”

Davis comments on another popular Jazz Fest artist: “Jimmy Buffett is very, very special to us. He’s been responsible for drawing more people to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival than maybe anybody else.” Buffett says in the documentary: “Everything I do, from writing shows to writing songs comes out from being a child of the Mardi Gras.”

Other artists interviewed include Irma Thomas; Pitbull; Boyfriend; Sony Landreth; Big Freedia; Tom Jones; Divine Ladies member Angelina Sever; Preservation Hall Jazz Band member Ben Jaffe; Cowboy Mouth member Fred LeBlanc; High Steppers Brass Band member Daryl Fields; Tab Benoit; Marc Savoy; John Hammond; and Earth, Wind & Fire members Philip Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson. The documentary also has archival footage of several performances, including those by Aaron Neville; Katy Perry with the Gospel Soul Children; Thomas; Pitbull; B.B. King; Al Green; Hammond; Big Freedia; Preservation Hall Jazz Band; Herbie Hancock; Nashville Super Choir; and Earth, Wind & Fire.

There’s an entire segment in the documentary about the food of Jazz Fest, with soundbites from some Jazz Fest food vendors, along with the expected delectable-looking display of New Orleans cuisine, such as jambalaya, crawfish, pralines and beignets. The movie tends to drift off-topic in the middle of the film, when it veers into a prolonged discussion of Mardi Gras, including the history of Mardi Gras and how Mardi Gras has impacted New Orleans Fortunately, the documentary eventually gets back on track to talking about Jazz Fest.

One of the best aspects of the documentary is the discussion about how Jazz Fest had a triumphant comeback in 2006, after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Bruce Springsteen’s emotionally moving Jazz Fest 2006 performance of “My City of Ruins” is in the documentary. Springsteen comments, “There are certain moments when you meet your audience, and that’s when the healing begins. It was one of the most beautiful concert experiences I ever had.”

The epilogue of “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” includes mention of how, for the first time in Jazz Fest history, the event was cancelled. It happened in 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The epilogue includes a brief mention of Jazz Fest’s return in 2022, with footage of Buffet performing a rousing cover version of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

“Jazz Fest” is a documentary that often comes across as an electronic press kit video, because the commentary is non-stop praise of Jazz Fest and/or New Orleans, with no mention of any under-reported problems of Jazz Fest. The movie lacks any constructive criticism of the event and doesn’t talk about issues such as overcrowding or overpricing. But as a documentary that’s meant to celebrate the event, “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” is at its best when it lets the music and performances do the talking.

Sony Pictures Classics released “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” in select U.S. cinemas on May 13, 2022.

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