Best Music Docs of 2017
Deadheads, jazzbos and punk rockers unite! We’ve got our picks for the year’s best music documentaries – from a look at the Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip of a career to the four-hour, definitive portrait of 50 years of Rolling Stone.
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Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge
Image Credit: Baron Wolman/courtesy of HBO Filmmakers Alex Gibney and Blair Foster’s two-part look back at 50 years of Rolling Stone details the evolution of a magazine that shaped the culture it chronicled. The scenes of founder Jann Wenner and photographer Annie Leibovitz discussing the famous 1981 John Lennon cover are an incredible historic testament.
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May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers
Image Credit: Jonathan Furmanski Documentarian Michael Bonfiglio and famous Avetts fan Judd Apatow were on hand during the recording of the roots-pop band’s great 2016 album, True Sadness, and ended up chronicling a divorce, a birth and several existential crises. It’s a real-time depiction of personal struggle shaping artistic achievement.
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Long Strange Trip
Image Credit: Jim Marshall/The Grateful Dead, via Amazon Prime Video A sprawling history of the Grateful Dead that mirrors their musical explorations, Amir Bar-Lev’s four-hour doc follows Jerry & Co.’s evolution from psychedelia radicals to corporate touring juggernaut. It’s a behemoth of a film that doesn’t shy away from the darkness that surrounded the Dead, especially their leader, and that makes it all the more powerful.
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Two Trains Runnin’
Weaving two narratives – one of blues rediscovery, one of civil-rights tragedy – this journey into the dark heart of Mississippi in the summer of 1964 is deeply resonant today. Featuring excellent musical performances by Buddy Guy, Lucinda Williams and Gary Clark Jr.
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Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk
Image Credit: Murray Bowles Long before Green Day and Rancid became household names and 924 Gilman St. morphed into a West Coast CBGB’s, the Bay Area’s not-quiet-on-the-Eastern-front cities were churning out punk rock groups by the dozens. Corbett Redford’s surprisingly thorough doc traces the scene’s evolution from its early days crawling out of San Francisco’s shadow to being dubbed the Next Seattle. Worth its weight in tattered Xeroxed ‘zines.
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I Called Him Morgan
Lee Morgan was a big deal in the 1960s NYC hard-bop scene; Helen More was a jazz fanatic who’d help the trumpeter get off drugs, become his common-law wife and, one night in between sets at an East Village nightclub, shoot him dead. Kasper Collin’s portrait of two mercurial music lovers is both a corrective to those who don’t know the former Jazz Messenger Ensemble player’s work and a painfully tragic amour fou story.