Now playing at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), *Free Jazz on Film: Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp* documents live performance in the idiom of free jazz, with the camera tracking gesture, breath, and ensemble tension as much as sound. Sun Ra’s ritualized bandstand logic, Cecil Taylor’s percussive pianism, and Archie Shepp’s politically alert tenor approach map three different routes through the same era’s unrest. In New York, where this music took shape across lofts and institutions, the screening reads as local history preserved on celluloid. One clear takeaway is how film turns improvisation into an archival record without flattening its volatility.
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