Tag Archives: the New York Art Quartet

Documentary Film Review: “The Breath Courses Through Us”…cellabrating The New York Art Quartet’s 50th anniversary by Alan Roth

Review by Dawoud Kringle

Enduring a Long, Hard Gig. The Breath Courses Through Us.

Photo by Marylin Schwartz

Photo by Marylin Schwartz

A grainy, seemingly vintage film of a music aficionado thumbing through a stack of records, and pulling out an LP of the New York Art Quartet forms a silent, yet eloquent imagery. Putting the vinyl on a turntable, the sound of free jazz greets us. Flash forward to the present day. Older master jazz musicians set up their instruments, and begin playing a free form music over which a poetic voice declares, “Everything that you don’t understand is explained in art.”

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A Documentary Film: “The Breath Courses Through Us” by Alan Roth about the early 1960s avant-garde jazz group, the New York Art

Featuring: Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Milford Graves, Reggie Workman, Amiri Baraka with: Steve Lacy, Pierre Dørge and Ben Young. – Guests: Evan Patrick, Verna Gillis, Lois Graves, Thurston Moore, David Murray, Maya Milenovic Workman, Margaret Naber and Yolo Tchicai

The U.S. premiere will take place on Friday evening, January 31, 2014 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The world premiere of The Breath Courses Through Us took place at the FIDMarseille-Festival International de Cinéma
(http://www.fidmarseille.org) in Marseille, France, in July 2013.

The Breath Courses Through Us (2013) is a documentary film by Alan Roth about the early 1960s avant-garde jazz group, the New York Art Quartet. The film focuses on the group’s 35-year reunion, while reaching back through their recollections of their foundations and innovative musical ideas. The year 2014 is the 50th anniversary of this group, and a revolutionary period in jazz music, which declared its existence in the October Revolution in Jazz, in October 1964.

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