Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes

One of the charms of “Blue Note” is the stories the artists tell about each other.

This tidy, thoughtful film gets at jazz’s joy and pain.

A lot of jazz labels have mattered, but none has mattered the way Blue Note did — and, thanks to a proudly hip-hop-inflected present, still does. It’s the gold standard of recorded improvisational music. Sophie Huber’s briskly reverential documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, lets us see and hear why.

As standard a documentary as it is in presentation, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is cleverly assembled and edited, making the most of available archival material to flesh out the stories of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver et al, and of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the two German-Jewish immigrants who escaped the war and redefined America’s music culture.

It will probably get the job done for casual jazz fans — after all, it features clips of some of the most incredible, enchanting and inspiring recordings ever made. Those already familiar with the genre may be disappointed to discover that it mostly sticks with the notes they know and very seldom ventures beyond.

The film offers enough astute insights and terrific interviews and performance footage to attract buffs while serving as a superb introduction for neophytes.

While the film will be of acute interest to jazz fans, the film offers up an object lesson in how contemporary documentaries function in the 21st century. Comprised of the requisite talking heads, archival footage, and the shotgun blast of endless photographs of iconic moments, the film delivers a perfunctory tableau that is right at home with the programming on The History Channel (with fewer Nazis, of course).