Bird
Round Midnight
Mo' Better Blues
The Five Pennies
Sweet And Lowdown
Sweet Love, Bitter
Tune in Tomorrow...
Paris Blues
St. Louis Blues
The Glenn Miller Story
Young Man with a Horn
Lady Sings the Blues
The Gene Krupa Story
Stormy Weather
Cabin in the Sky
The Benny Goodman Story
The Cotton Club
Kansas City
I'll even add the Showtime original movie Lush Life, a drama about two best friends who play jazz in night clubs starring Jeff Goldblum and Forest Whitaker. Oh, 1993, you were so long ago...
And let's not forget that Don Cheadle has a part in “Lush Life"—so there's that bit of jazz connection between the actor and his forthcoming biopic about Miles Davis.
The truth is that this category isn't exactly overflowing with titles to choose from.
Now, films featuring a jazz score? Sure, we have plenty of superb choices: Anatomy of a Murder featuring Duke Ellington, Ascenseur pour l'échaffaud with the music of Miles Davis, Alex North's music for Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire, any number of Woody Allen and Spike Lee films and so on...
I'll go ahead and say if the Miles Davis Biopic comes out as well as I'm expecting, I would slot it immediately at #1 on the all-time best movies about jazz list—no offense to “Bird," “Round Midnight" and a few others.
And to think Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughn are each without a big screen adaptation (as far as I know). Any of them would be great subjects for a Hollywood/Indie film.
I was about to add another favorite to the list, Nina Simone, but there's a Untitled Nina Simone Project on the books.
