Movies: Duke Ellington

The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington...

Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier travel down memory lane to see what life was like back in the 1920s. Harry Belafonte introduces this musical, written by poet and playwright Langston Hughes, which pays tribute to Harlem in the 1920's. Sidney Poitie...

An aspiring singer is tasked with promoting the music catalogue of his great-grandfather, the famous songwriter Jimmy McHugh, recorded by everyone from Sinatra to Lady Gaga. While licensing these songs for movies, commercials, TV and Broadway shows, ...

Agent Pete Garland is fired by society singer Monica Barrett after he got her a new radio contract, because she thinks her lawyer friend Teddy Leeds fits in better with her social status. To get even, Pete wants to make an unknown singer into a star....

Jeff grows up near Basin Street in New Orleans, playing his clarinet with the dock workers. He puts together a band, the Basin Street Hot-Shots, which includes a cornet player, Memphis. They struggle to get their jazz music accepted by the cafe socie...

Ossie Davis narrates a history of "race films," films made before 1950 which catered to a primarily black audience....

The history of New York City's Apollo Theater in Harlem is given the full treatment....

After a look at some strange creatures, the narrator and camera take us to the Chaco forest, on the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where a vampire bat lives, desmodus rotondus, attacking wildlife and domesticated creatures, killing small...

With a unique style that encompassed soul, jazz and pop, Lou Rawls established himself as one of the premier voices of the modern musical age. This outstanding episode of his self-titled variety show is packed with soulful blues tunes and beautiful b...

This short documentary by writer and archivist Ehsan Khoshbakht tells the story of Duke Ellington's concert tour of the Middle East in 1963 and the development of one of the most beautiful jazz standards....

Duke Ellington and Orchestra perform 'C Jam Blues'....

Gracie Allen assumes the "management" of the shop owned by her papa Horatio Allen, turning it into a radio station and then an aviary---with the usual Gracie Allen logic---while distracted Papa is trying to get younger daughter, beauty contest winner...

In 1955, on his report, a medical examiner wrote in the box: age, “about 53 years”. Charlie Parker nicknamed Bird just died, at 34. His death will be the ransom of a life that was not denied to the excesses or the consuming flame of genius. His wilde...

In 1999, on the occasion of the centenary of Ellington's birth, Franco Maresco commissioned Steve Lacy to perform ten songs by the Duke, which were recorded and filmed in Palermo. In 2024, twenty years after Lacy's death and fifty years after that of...

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Documentary portrait of the legendary jazz bandleader. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2000....

A made-for-TV musical revue, compiled from soundies and film and TV performances by jazz greats from the 1930s to the 1950s....

A compilation reel of television commercials produced by Story Board Inc....

The life of two characters who follow each other beyond the walls....

Improvisational jazz performance filmed in 1950 by Gjon Mili plus Duke Ellington Trio filmed in July 1966, Count Basie at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1977, Joe Pass 1979, Ella Fitzgerald 1979, and Oscar Peterson at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1977....