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Sounds Of Jazz On Screen

Akbank Jazz Festival on one side, films with jazz music on the other…

Jazz and cinema are two art forms that came into their own in the twentieth century, and naturally they touched on each other. Jazz musicians showed their stuff in film and the sounds of jazz were heard on the silver screen.

Taking this year’s 20th Akbank Jazz Festival as a pretext, the ‘Pera Museum Film Festival’ has added a series of films featuring jazz music, ‘Jazz in Film’, to its schedule. The showings, which run through October 17th, take audiences on a brief journey through time from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. ‘Jazz in Film’, which includes one documentary and seven feature films, awaits not only jazz lovers but old film buffs as well.

Some of the jazz films are the 1934 production, ‘Murder at the Vanities’, featuring Duke Ellington, and Louis Malle’s ‘Elevator to the Gallows’, which features the music of Miles Davis against a Paris backdrop, as well as ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day’, one of the best jazz documentaries ever made, with the sounds of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.