Play the Way You Feel

Download or read book Play the Way You Feel written by Kevin Whitehead and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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?--