To Save and Project ’26: Free Jazz on Film

Jazz hasn’t been considered popular music since the mid-1940’s. Even so, Free Jazz has always been and probably shall always be jazz’s least commercial style. Yet, like all jazz musicians, Free Jazz artists consistently find greener pastures abroad. Not surprisingly, most (or perhaps all) of these Free Jazz short documentaries were filmed on foreign soil. Cecil Taylor had a high-profile concert gig in Paris. Archie Shepp was touring Africa. Plus, Sun Ra might have been playing on the planet Saturn—at least in spirit. Yet, their music—though free—is more accessible than you might expect, when their respective films screen today as part of the “Free Jazz on Film” program, during MoMA’s 2026 To Save and Project festival at MoMA.

Phil Niblock’s The Magic Sun might even be more experimental than Sun Ra’s music. Using stark reverse negative black-and-white cinematography and extreme close-ups, Niblock captures Sun Ra and his Arkestra in performance. It is not your grandpa’s big band jazz, but it is big—and a band. It is also funky and psychedelic. This is a great example of why Sun Ra was a huge influence on bands like Sonic Youth.

At seventeen minutes, it certainly constitutes a short film. However, you could also think of it as the Sun Ra video that should have aired on MTV.  Even today, it looks cutting edge, but it also serves as relatively easy entry point into Free Jazz. However, Sun Ra was always just as much a big band leader as he was a Free Jazz artist. Indeed, his final A&M records were largely straight-ahead, but still funky.

Ghaouti Bendeddouche’s We Came Back (Archie Shepp Chez Tauregs) has always been hard to find but the live recording of the Panafrican Festival performance it documents has been much easier to get your hands on. It was a celebration of culture and radical politics, but fortunately the speeches and sloganeering Bendeddouche excerpts are relatively bland out of context.

Arguably, this features the most stirring music of the three-film block. Shepp starts out quite free, playing with the anguished expressiveness that defined his style. However, the rhythm and instrumentation of the Yoruba and Berber musicians accompanying him impose structure that brings out the best in Shepp.

In fact, Shepp could play it straight quite eloquently. His two duo standards albums with Horace Parlan, Trouble in Mind and Goin’ Home, are bluesey and truly beautiful.

Gerard Patris’s Great Rehearsals: Cecil Taylor in Paris is exactly what the title suggests. This is Taylor at his prime, with an accomplished and highly compatible combo, including Jimmy Lyons on alto, Alan Silva on bass, and Andrw Cyrille on drums. This is as free as the triple feature is going to get, but the first two films should partially acclimate viewers.

It also might help to compare Taylor’s music to the composition of a Jackson Pollock. It is abstract but patterns will emerge. The rehearsal also captures the percussiveness of Taylor’s attack, which also implies a sense of rhythm. Nevertheless, it is ironic to hear Taylor dismiss Stockhausen, the avant-garde composer, saying “he doesn’t come from my neighborhood.” Yet, Taylor’s uncompromisingly aesthetic arguably sounds just as elitist and divorced from popular tastes to contemporary ears.

Sun Ra, Shepp, and Taylor were all truly musical titans. There ought to be considerably more documentary footage of all three, but jazz, particularly Free Jazz, has always been a tough pitch. That’s why its nice to se these short films programmed together. Highly recommended, the “Free Jazz on Film” short doc block screens today (1/24) at MoMA.