Blues like Showers of Rain and Jazz is Our Religion

18 TBC

Blues Like Showers of Rain (1970) provides an unflinching insight into the conditions that gave birth to the blues in America, charting the evolving sound of the blues as musicians moved from rural areas into the cities. As both director and editor Jeremy deftly combines the field recordings and still photographs of the British blues historian Paul Oliver (1927 – 2017) gathered on a trip through the United States in 1960.

Jazz Is Our Religion (1971) is an emotional distillation of jazz and the jazz life expressed in pictures, music, voices and poetry. The poetry includes the words of writers like Langston Hughes and Ted Joans, the pictures are mainly derived from the photographs of Val Wilmer. The sympathetic strength of her camera’s eye provides the film with a range of marvellously arresting visuals which in turn have been harnessed to the various soundtrack elements.