Play the Way You Feel

This book-both a narrative and a film directory-surveys and analyzes English-language feature films (and a few shorts and TV shows/movies) made between 1927 and 2016 that tell stories about jazz music, its musicians, its history and culture. Play the Way You Feel looks at jazz movies as a narrative tradition with recurring plot points and story tropes, whose roots and development are traced. It also demonstrates how jazz stories cut across diverse genres-biopic, romance, musical, comedy and science fiction, horror, crime and comeback stories, race movies" and modernized Shakespeare-even as they constitute a genre of their own. The book is also a directory/checklist of such films, 66 of them with extensive credits, plus dozens more shorter/capsule discussions. Where jazz films are based on literary sources, they are examined, and the nature of their adaptation explored: what gets retained, removed, or invented? What do historical films get right and wrong? How does a film's music, and the style of the filmmaking itself, reinforce or undercut the story?--