PENNEBAKER HEGEDUS FILMS

Produced for Sony Music, Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You captures the jazz musician/composer in the recording studio, jamming with Sting and the Grateful Dead, teaching student workshops, hanging out backstage, and on tour performing with Jeff Tain Watts and Bob Hurst.

Selections include “Citizen Tain,” “Without a Pass,” “Roused About,” “We Work the Black Seam,” “Classroom Jam,” “The Star Spangled Banner” and “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.”

“An appreciative, hour-long documentary portrait of the jazz saxophonist, directed by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus in typically simple, penetrating style. Seen mostly while on the road, Mr. Marsalis is revealed as an uncommonly articulate musician with distinct ideas about his work in particular and jazz in general. ‘You don’t play what you feel,’ he says, during the discussion from which the film’s title is taken. ‘There’s only freedom in structure, my man. There’s no freedom in freedom.’”

— Janet Maslin, The New York Times