Another one similar to “20 Feet” is “Standing in the Shadow of Motown”, a documentary about The Funk Brothers and their often uncredited contribution to soul music.
Agree with “Sonic Highways”. Grohl did a good job with that.
Wow, missed this one completely. It’s on Hulu now, and I just finished watching the first episode. Fascinating stuff.
In Beware of Mr. Baker, Ginger talks about how African drumming heavily influenced his style, which in turn became the template for many drummers styles after Cream.
If radio documentaries are your thing BBC 6 Music has a lot of them online (though not all of them are online at any given time), and they can be very in depth (which I am a fan of personally, lack of content is the main sin of a lot modern documentaries IMO)…
Mento to Lover’s Rock, history Jamaican Music by Linton Kwesi Johnson. 10 episodes:
A-Z of Psychedelia in 26 (obviously) 10 minute episodes:
I’m not into their music, but thoroughly enjoyed A Band Called Death. They were a hard rock band from Detroit. They were offered a record company contract - provided they change their name. And of course the industry had a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of of Black brothers playing hard rock. They were completely forgotten except for a single that wound up being discovered by a collector.
Damn. I don’t know anything about this band, but just looked up “For the Whole World to See” album on Youtube, and, shit, WHY haven’t I heard of this band? This is incredible stuff. Will check out the documentary. Thanks.
If you have access, the BBC are currently showing a 3-part series called Guitar Drum and Bass, each part presented by a well known player.
I thought the Tina Weymouth one on bass guitar was very good, the Stewart Copeland drum one had some very good stuff, but a bit too much of Copeland waving his arms around, and I haven’t seen the Lenny Kaye one yet.
It Might Get Loud with Jack White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge.
Seconding this. Turner Classic Movies TCM showed a number of them last summer (on his 100th birthday). There’s a DVD set on Amazon with these episodes:
[ul]
[li]Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1954)[/li][li]The World of Jazz (1955)[/li][li]The Art of Conducting (1955)[/li][li]American Musical Comedy (1956)[/li][li]Introduction to Modern Music (1957)[/li][li]The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1957)[/li][li]What Makes Opera Grand? (1958).[/li][/ul]
I enjoyed The Future Is Unwritten about Joe Strummer.
Best. Music documentary. Ever.
Watching Jack White construct then play that “guitar” was mesmerizing. Seeing the joy on Jimmy Page’s face while playing some of his favorite records after all these years…just magic.
The Most Feared Song in Jazz, Explained: Making sense of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”
How about the “Muscle Shoals” documentary? I really liked it.
Lots and lots of great suggestions so far. Given the fact that the blues is the basic for almost everything in popular music that came after, I strongly recommend the 7 pieces series Martin Scorcese Presents The Blues. It’s essential.
And for a different perspective, two great documentaries about kinda cult acts that were essentially doomed from the beginning, produced some of the most staggering recordings in their respective fields but never had the chance to hit it big in their times, the reasons laid out in those documentaries:
Big Star - Nothing Can Hurt Meabout Big Star.
Be Here To Love Me- about the late great Townes Van Zandt
Festival Express is good, especially if you like early 70’s Rock and Roll.
A little hard to find now, but I really enjoyed this history of rock & roll called, Rock & Roll.
It didn’t go chronologically, but rather by sub-genre. They had episodes about glam rock, funk, Motown, the British invasion, punk, rap, etc. The funk episode was particularly great. I found a lot of new favorites the first time I watched it, which I still listen to today.
Glad you dug it! Do check out the documentary as well. I learned about them when the Oak Park School of Rock did a proto-Punk show and the kids loved their music. I Tweeted their performance and one of the members of the band replied and was just so great about it.
Love the energy of the kids, especially the guitarists and drummer. How did they end up playing this out of all the songs out there?
Every show has a director who has the job of making a playlist and guiding the weekly three hour rehearsals - and all of them are working musicians, generally from local/regional bands (it’s a good job for a working musician - you don’t have to get up before noon.) The rest of the show were the usual suspects - Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, the Damned, the Ramones - with a few lesser-knowns like Alternative TV, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Death. The kids also have weekly one-on-one lessons on their song. This goes on for 12-16 weeks, then they have a pair of shows in a real venue.
Sound city. I’m too lazy to find a link. But it was made by Dave Grohl about the Sound City music studio in van nuys.