Two Great Music Documentaries

My favorite all-time music documentary is The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film about The Band’s last concert in San Francisco.

   Just last week I saw two very different music documentaries that I’d rate right up there along with The Last Waltz:

1. The Inside Llewyn Davis Concert Film, which took place in New York this September, songs from the movie, which is just about to open, curated by T-bone Burnett. All acoustic, an incredible and wonderful concert. Look at the lineup. It was on Showtime.

Click here.

2. Blues And The Alligator: The First Twenty Years Of Alligator Records (2011) I found this in Amazon Prime by typing in “music documentaries” in the search window. (I find a lot better music of this nature in Amazon Prime than in Netflix.) The trouble with most music documentaries is that they’re heavy on the talk and light on the music. Not so here. So good. Koko Taylor, Lonnie Brooks, Hound Dog Taylor,  archival footage of Sonny boy Williamson, a charming bunch of 10-year-old kids singing the blues in a classroom…“Blues is a healing music!”, (Blues Iglauer) explains, “and as long as there’s a need to be healed, the Blues will live on.” PLUS, the photography is brilliant. Hail to Jim Downing, the creator! I just ordered the DVD.

Click here.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

One Response to Two Great Music Documentaries

Leave a Reply