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Composer Alexandre Desplat plays “Happy Birthday to You” on his keyboard — but with a twist: the final note on “you” is higher than in the traditional melody.

It’s Igor Stravinsky’s “Greeting Prelude,” a serial variation of the familiar tune composed in 1955 for the 80th birthday of French conductor Pierre Monteux. This inventive transformation by the Russian composer inspired Desplat to, as he puts it, “bend” a piece from Stravinsky’s ballet “The Firebird” for the score of Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” now playing in theaters.

“The seed of the score comes from a piece by Stravinsky, and there’s this little, short melody that I’ve used, and twisted and expanded,” Desplat tells Variety over Zoom. “When I started playing with that, I thought about what Stravinsky had done, and tried to stay in Stravinsky’s world.”

Desplat taps out a brief melody on his keyboard...

Quincy Jones died last Sunday night at age 91—another entertainment legend who shuffled off this mortal coil this year before the country once again made the ass-backwards decision to put Trump in office. A lot has already been said about his multi-Grammy-winning discography, which includes producing and arranging music not...

Jack Jones, a singer who found fame and chart success on the easy-listening side of the street in the 1960s, and who later became etched in television-watching America’s psyche with the “Love Boat” theme, died Wednesday at 86.

Jones died of leukemia at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, Calif., his wife of 15 years, Eleanora Jones, said.

Jones had hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, but his highest chart numbers could be found on what was then known as the easy listening chart, which later became adult contemporary. In the easy listening format, he had No. 1 singles with “The Race is On” in 1965, “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” in 1966 and “Lady” in 1967.

In particular, “The Impossible Dream” — a cover of the most popular song from the 1965 Broadway musical “Man of La Mancha” — became culturally ubiquitous, through Jones’ frequent TV appearances, even though it peaked at No. 35 on the Hot 100, where it...

Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader’s latest, highly anticipated film ‘Oh, Canada,’ which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday.

Based on the late Russell Banks’ 2021 novel “Foregone,” the film centers on Gere’s Leonard Fife, an acclaimed filmmaker and “one of 60,000 draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam” who “shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life.” Elordi plays the younger version of Leonard.

In this first-look clip, Gere’s Leonard speeds up to someone’s home, gets out of a car and walks toward the gate. “Amanda was a jazz pianist,” his voiceover begins. “She said she was the mistress of Gerry Mulligan, but he was always on the road.” Then, the footage displays the film’s magic trick, as Elordi’s younger Leonard appears, pushing open the home’s gate and peering in the window,...

If there’s a pop musician of the last 60 years who deserves a great documentary, it’s Antonio Carlos Jobim. Some might bristle at my description of him as “pop.” In Brazil, where Jobim, one of the prime architects of bossa nova, is considered a national treasure, he’s simply thought of as a composer, placed on a pedestal along with classical Brazilian composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos. Jobim’s gorgeously complex chord structures — the aural equivalent of melty-colored Impressionist paintings — were arguably more jazz than pop.

Yet we’re long past the point where pop can’t include all that. Just consider Steely Dan’s “Aja,” an album of luminous jazz modalities that also happens to be the purest pop. Jobim, though he wrote in assorted forms, was quintessentially a composer of pop songs, and they had a tranquil forlorn incandescence all their own. There was something in the air...

The soundtrack for American Hustle, the David O. Russell-directed 2013 crime caper, contains songs by a wide range of legendary musicians, from Tom Jones to the Bee Gees to Duke Ellington. The movie tells a fictionalized account of the Abscam operation of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Bradley Cooper stars as an FBI agent who recruits a pair of con artists, played by Amy Adams and Christian Bale, for a sting operation to catch crooked politicians. American Hustle was released to critical and commercial success. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and all four acting categories.

In an interview with Esquire, Russell described American Hustle as “a propulsive kind of cinema that was driven by music.” The soundtrack was key to giving the movie its feel. Russell’s direction of American Hustle borrows heavily from Martin Scorsese’s signature style of fast-paced,...

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Gene Cipriano, the always busy woodwind player who soloed on tenor sax for Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot and recorded with everyone from Miles Davis, Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra to Glen Campbell, Paul McCartney and Olivia Newton-John, has died. He was 94.

Cipriano died Nov. 12 of natural causes at his home in Studio City, his son Paul told The Hollywood Reporter.

Perhaps the most recorded woodwind player in show business history, Cipriano played soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, all the clarinets and flutes, the oboe and bass oboe, the piccolo and the English horn.

Affectionally known as “Cip,” the session musician performed as a member of the Academy Awards Orchestra in the neighborhood of 60 times since 1958. (At the 1977 show, he exchanged “yo’s” with Barbra Streisand, who had just arrived at the podium after having won for “Evergreen.”)

Cipriano...

The Rolling Stones have been doing Rolling Stones documentaries for nearly as long as they’ve been a band, and given their early goes, it’s impressive they’ve kept at it. The first, Charlie Is My Darling (1966), was shelved for decades due to legal fights and various shenanigans; The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968), a trainwreck of poor planning, was also shelved for years. Jean Luc-Godard’s brilliant but befuddling docufiction One Plus One (Sympathy For The Devil) got consigned to the art film circuit that same year,...

“Can we go deep into the obscure, or do we need to stay mainstream?”

When Matt Groening asks that question, the invitation is tantalizing to consider. In this case, Groening is talking about jazz, and specifically about his new partnership with Quincy Jones’ music-video hub, Qwest TV. His mission for Qwest was a curated video playlist revealing the jazz influences crucial to Groening — personally, professionally and to “The Simpsons,” most famously in sax-playing characters such as Bleeding Gums Murphy and Homer’s precocious daughter, Lisa Simpson.

Jones’ streaming channel offers a wealth of rarely seen concerts, documentaries, interviews and music-related archival films. Groening’s playlist ranges from “mainstream” names such as Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus to the “avant-garde” likes of saxophonists Moondog and Archie Shepp and pianist Carla Bley.

“When I was invited to do this, the first thing I did was make half of my list...

Powerful musical moments are undercut by exasperating blandness in this rerelease of Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport jazz festival

This rerelease of Bert Stern’s filmed record of the 1958 Newport jazz festival happens to arrive in the UK just after Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem cultural festival, known then as the “Black Woodstock”. Both events and both movies feature the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson – but there the comparison ends. Where Summer of Soul is amazingly vibrant and passionate, Jazz on a Summer’s Day is exasperatingly sedate and restrained and often just bloodless and dull, despite some occasionally intriguing musical offerings from musicians such as Thelonious Monk, George Shearing and Gerry Mulligan; Chuck Berry is there, on his bland best behaviour, and finally we get some powerfully charismatic appearances from Louis Armstrong and Jackson herself.

During the daytime, the movie bizarrely intercuts shots of the musicians on...

In the fall of 1994, Chad Smith was in the middle of a soundcheck at the Rose Bowl, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers were about to open for the Rolling Stones, when his drum tech started gesturing to him with his head. “I look over and he was giving me one of those [motions], like, ‘Hey, look over here,’ and I look by the monitor desk and Charlie Watts was standing there. It was a warm Los Angeles afternoon, and he’s in a perfect suit. I’m like, [mock-sheepishly] ‘Ah, shit,...

"We are at the jazz festival, and let me tell you it is really wonderful." Kino Lorber has revealed an official trailer for a 4K restoration re-release of a classic concert doc called Jazz on a Summer's Day. Legendary photographer Bert Stern's groundbreaking concert documentary shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival featuring performances by Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson and more. The 1959 classic is considered one of the most extraordinary and possibly the first concert film ever made. The film was named to the National Film Registry in 1999, and its restoration was funded by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress in time to celebrate the film's 60th Anniversary. This looks like an awesome film to see in 4K in a cinema with full-on sound! An exceptional round of jazz music from some of the finest musicians...

It’s a summer without live music, among many other things, but one can live cathartically through classic concert films. One of the most acclaimed of its kind has received a new 4K restoration by IndieCollect and after a world premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival, it will now be arriving to theaters, virtual cinemas, and drive-ins courtesy of Kino Lorber Repertory.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day captures a classic series of performances that occurred at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and features Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, as well as a midnight performance of The Lord’s Prayer by Mahalia Jackson.

Directed by Bert Stern, the film was named to the National Film Registry in 1999, and its restoration was funded by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress in time to celebrate the film’s 60th Anniversary.

Lee Konitz, an alto saxophonist who was an exemplar of jazz’s so-called “cool school,” died Wednesday in Manhattan of coronavirus complications, according to his niece, Linda Konitz.

Unlike the somewhat frantic and passionate be-bop, Konitz’s style was considered more laid back and cerebral. While some dismissed it as too passive, most recognized it as a unique path for those who wished to blaze a new and unique harmonic style.

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While Konitz wasn’t as well-known as a lot of his contemporaries, he was much-admired in the jazz world. He also taught for many years from his Manhattan apartment to a worldwide legion of acolytes.

Since Fountains of Wayne co-founder Adam Schlesinger died of complications from Covid-19 on April 1st, tributes from his many friends and collaborators have poured in from all corners. Here, author and playwright David Bar Katz remembers their 35-year friendship.

There are songs we would all have known by heart that we’re never going to hear. There were going to be musicals we’d have waited in line to see that will never be composed. The expressions on my friend’s face that I was counting on to brighten the...

Jack Sheldon, known to children as one of the voices of “Schoolhouse Rocks” and adults as a master trumpeter who served as music director on “The Merv Griffin Show,” has died at age 88.

Sheldon was the sidekick as well as MD on Griffin’s talk show for 18 years. But his own discography as a band leader added up to more than 20 albums, starting in the late ’50s, when he was part of the west coast bebop movement, continuing through his last release in 2007.

“To all Jack Sheldon fans,” Cynthia Jimenez wrote on the musician’s Facebook page, “on behalf of my sister Dianne Jimenez [his longtime manager], sadly, Jack passed away on December 27. May he rest in peace with all the Jazz Cats in heaven!” No cause of death was given.

Sheldon’s film work included one of the renditions of “The Long Goodbye” heard in the Robert Altman movie of that name,...

Jack Sheldon, the stand-out jazz trumpeter and affable Merv Griffin sidekick whose gave voice to the Schoolhouse Rock classics I’m Just a Bill and Conjunction Junction, has died. He was 88.

Sheldon’s face and name were most recognizable to fans of The Merv Griffin Show thanks to his 16-year sidekick stint but his trumpeting reached its greatest acclaim via the big screen with the forlorn Oscar- and Grammy-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile from The Sandpiper (1965).

Sheldon’s voice, however, became a signature part of Saturday morning cartoons for years thanks to two beloved installments of the oft-repeated Schoolhouse Rock educational series of animated shorts. The ABC series was ramping up its second season when it brought Sheldon in and the charismatic jazzman delivered winning performances both as the dedicated train conductor from Conjunction Junction (1974) and lonely piece of proposed legislation in the civics-minded I’m Just a Bill.

IndieCollect oversaw 4K restoration. Film will open in 2020 theatrically and on new VOD platform.

Kino Lorber has acquired Us and all international rights to Bert Stern’s recent 57th New York Film Festival revival screening Jazz On A Summer’s Day, in collaboration with longtime partner Adopt Films.

The film will release the 1959 film – regarded as one of the first live concert films – theatrically in 2020 before making it available on the company’s new VOD platform KinoNow, and home video.

IndieCollect oversaw a 4K restoration on Jazz On A Summer’s Day, with colour correction by Oskar Miarka. The film...

For many Rolling Stones fans, Charlie Watts is the band’s most mysterious and intriguing member. He’s a guy who prefers jazz to rock, yet has spent nearly 60 years playing in the world’s greatest rock & roll band. (When the Stones played Glastonbury in 2013, he said, “I don’t want to do it. Everyone else does. I don’t like playing outdoors, and I certainly don’t like festivals.”) A well-dressed eccentric, he is known to draw a sketch of every single hotel room he stays in and owns...

Patrick Williams, who was best-known for his Emmy-winning television music but who was also a renowned and Grammy-winning big-band jazz leader and arranger, died Wednesday morning of complications from cancer at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 79.

Williams was among the most versatile composers of his generation, earning an Oscar nomination, four Emmys and two Grammys during more than 50 years of music-making in New York and Los Angeles.

In the middle of his most prolific period, scoring music for TV including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Streets of San Francisco,” he was also nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music for his groundbreaking “An American Concerto” (1976) for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra.

He scored nearly 50 films, often memorable scores for movies that were not big hits, including “Casey’s Shadow,” “The Cheap Detective” and “Cuba” in the 1970s; “Used Cars,...

By Patrick Shanley

Managing Editor

This year’s best documentary feature nominees continues a long trend of music docs being recognized by the Academy, as two music-related films have earned nominations at this year’s Oscars.

Amy, which tells the story of late songstress Amy Winehouse in her own words through never-before-seen archival footage and unreleased tracks and is nominated for best doc this year, earned nominations for the Queer Palm and Golden Eye awards at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for director Asif Kapadia.

Filmmaker Liz Garbus earned the second nomination of her career with the Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? The film focuses on the life of iconic R&B singer Nina Simone and her life as a singer, mother, and civil rights activist. Garbus earned her first Oscar nomination in 1998 for her documentary The Farm: Angola, USA.

Music-related docs have been a hot topic for the Academy in years past,...

By Anjelica Oswald

Managing Editor

Keep on Keepin’ On, director Alan Hicks’ debut film, follows four years of the friendship and mentorship between jazz legend and trumpeter Clark Terry, who played with Count Basie and Duke Ellington and taught a young Quincy Jones how to play, and Justin Kauflin, a talented 23-year-old blind pianist. The two musicians support each other as Terry begins to lose his eyesight due to health issues and as Kauflin deals with stage fright as a semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. The film is one of 15 films on the Oscar documentary shortlist, five of which will be nominated on Jan. 15.

The Academy is particularly fond of music-related documentaries, nominating 17 since 1942, with eight winning. Keep on Keepin’ On could join the following Oscar-nominated films:

Festival (1967)

Director Murray Lerner’s black-and-white documentary offers a glimpse into three years (1963-1966) of the Newport Folk Festival, which...

Highly individual American drummer, bandleader and jazz visionary who toured with Lena Horne in the 1950s

A hundred years into its evolution, jazz incorporates ethnic and European classical instruments, drum machines and DJs spinning decks. A half-century or so ago, hardware habits were more cut and dried. A jazz big band had trumpets, trombones, saxes and a rhythm section. A small band had a rhythm section, a sax and trumpet, with maybe a guitar or a vibraphone. One that featured a (very quiet) guitarist, a flute or clarinet, a cellist, and a drummer who preferred mallets to sticks seemed like a strange beast in the jazz forest.

But the groups of the American drummer Chico Hamilton, who has died aged 92, did feature such instrumentation and, contrary to the jazz orthodoxies of the 1950s, they were for a time runaway successes. Hamilton led West Coast bands in that decade that came...

Photographer and film-maker who took some of the last shots of Marilyn Monroe

In the summer of 1962 Bert Stern, who has died aged 83, took more than 2,500 photographs of Marilyn Monroe over three sessions held in a Los Angeles hotel. The images captured Monroe in a sometimes pensive but mostly playful mood as she posed nude, variously covered by bedsheets, a chinchilla coat, a stripy Vera Neumann scarf and a pair of chiffon roses. Despite their air of carefree humour, the portraits are inescapably wistful because – along with George Barris's subsequent pictures of Monroe at Santa Monica beach – they are among the last photographs taken of the star. She was found dead at her home several weeks later.

The shoot was for Vogue, which had Stern on a contract that required him to fill 100 fashion pages a year and afforded him an additional 10 pages for personal projects. Stern proposed Monroe as a subject,...

What are your plans for the weekend? Here in the U.S., most folks are enjoying a long holiday weekend, filled with food, friends, and fireworks -- and maybe a free concert and a movie or two. On a personal note, with local temperatures soaring above 100 degrees for the past week or so, I'm staying inside and out of the weather as much as I can. And so I was pleased to find Jazz on a Summer's Day is available for free online viewing, courtesy of our friends at SnagFilms.

Directed by Aram Avakian and Bert Stern, the film documents the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the America's Cup sailing tournament, two events which go together like a cool drink on a hot day. Performers at the festival include Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O'Day (pictured), Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson. My knowledge of jazz is extremely limited,...

In December of 1957, CBS broadcast a program called "The Sound of Jazz." It featured an all-star lineup of jazz veterans including Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan. This particular clip is of the singer Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie and his orchestra, playing a supremely swinging version of "I Left My Baby." Soloists include Webster, Basie on piano, trombonist Dickie Wells, Eldridge, and the legendary Coleman Hawkins.

A bench in Central Park is the primary setting for Herb Gardner's "I'm Not Rappaport". Unfortunately, this filmic adaptation of Gardner's successful play largely sits in one place too, as if still on a stage.

Its sedentary visuals are largely overcome by Walter Matthau's crackling central performance as an elderly firebrand who rants and rages not only against life's ongoing injustices but also against his own incipient infirmity.

"Rappaport" should wrap some solid, select-site holiday business, but even with Matthau's blustery performance, "Rappaport"'s inert visualization, as well as its from-the-penthouse vantage point on Central Park's seedier sides, will hinder it from doing more than one lap around the boxoffice park.

With a bench as his primary soapbox, senior citizen Nat (Matthau) still fights the good fight. An old-time Lefty with a lifetime of union causes under his belt, Nat now finds himself a crusader without a movement. Too feisty and socially concerned to sit still, he insinuates himself into what he considers local injustices, protesting the high prices at the deli, for instance. He's a local-yokel Ralph Nader and Rosa Luxembourg rolled into one and his squirrelly tactics are not only provocative but amusing -- though least amusing for his protective daughter (Amy Irving), who fears that her elderly father will soon get himself into serious legal or physical danger.

In this outing, Matthau switches odd-couple partners and is paired with Ossie Davis, who plays Midge, a soft-spoken, gentle man whose nonconfrontational ways are the antithesis of Nat's feisty nature. It's their relationship that's the crux of the story and writer-director Gardner's perceptions are vital and touching. At its best, "Rappaport" is a very moving glimpse into the last days of two very different, idiosyncratic men who, through the restrictions of old age and economics, find themselves together at the end of their lives.

As powerful and commanding as Matthau is in his performance, so too is Davis in his portrayal of the low-key Midge. Beneath his character's fearful diffidence, Davis shows the stern mettle of a man who has survived many hurtful personal wars. In a supporting role, Amy Irving is also sympathetic as Nat's loving daughter whose patience is at the breaking point because of his shenanigans.

The central story is, unfortunately, thinly backscaped: Other denizens of the Park ring false, including a Latino thug (Guillermo Diaz), an ersatz cowboy (Craig T. Nelson) and a troubled teen (Martha Plimpton).

Under Gardner's static direction, the technical contributions do little to flesh out the vitality and energy of the location and the life situation. While composer Gerry Mulligan's baleful sax sounds clue us to the inner fears of Nat and Midge, the thin sounds convey none of the roiling nature of the Park setting. Throughout, cinematographer Adam Holender's static shooting confines "Rappaport" to the squeezed dimension of a stage proscenium, never allowing it to reach the billowing contradictory forces of its central characters' personalities.

I'M NOT RAPPAPORT

Gramercy Pictures

Producers John Penotti, John Starke

Screenwriter-director Herb Gardner

Executive producer David Sameth

Director of photography Adam Holender

Production designer Mark Friedberg

Editors Wendey Stanzler, Emily Paine

Music Gerry Mulligan

Costume designer Jennifer Von Mayrhauser

Casting Lynn Kressel

Sound mixer James Sabat

Color/stereo

Cast:

Nat Walter Matthau

Midge Ossie Davis

Clara Amy Irving

The Cowboy Craig T. Nelson

Danforth Boyd Gaines

Laurie Martha Plimpton

J.C. Guillermo Diaz

Clara Lemlich Elina Lowensohn

Running time -- 135 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13...