Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image by Nicolas Pillai

Abstract

Nicolas Pillai’s study of jazz in film and television arrives at a time when jazz is making an impressive and perhaps unexpected comeback in popular culture; films like Miles Ahead (2016), Don Cheadle’s genre-bending biopic on the life of Miles Davis, Robert Budreau’s Chet Baker biopic Born to Be Blue (2016), Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016), both of which contended at the Oscars, as well as a handful of jazz documentaries such as Jaco (2014), Chasing Trane (2016) and I Called Him Morgan (2016) have been recently released and made available on Netflix.

Keywords

• jazz studies
• film and television
• american modernism
• len lye
• gjon mili