Electric Heart - Don Ellis poster - please click to visit the web site

Filmmaker John Vizzusi writes with news of Electric Heart - Don Ellis, a feature-length documentary film about legendary jazz trumpet player Don Ellis (1934-1978). Electric Heart begins advanced screenings in May 2007.

Considered one of the most innovative composers, arrangers, writers and musicians of all time, Ellis was among the first to create a fusion between jazz-rock and classical music. Pulitzer-winning composer Gunther Schuller appears explaining that Ellis was the origin of Schuller’s own phrase "The Third Stream".

Electric Heart includes restored footage of Ellis and his band giving their historic 1966 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, with interviews from the band's members. Jazz legend the late Maynard Ferguson explains how Ellis was a composer who was never satisfied with a certain sound and who put "experimentation before entertainment."

Also interviewed is Holton designer Larry Ramirez who created for Ellis a four-valve trumpet, the fourth being a quarter-tone which contributed to Ellis’s signature sound.

Ellis and his "Tears of Joy" Band became well-known in the 1960s and the film includes interviews with band members Milcho Leviev, Fred Selden, Sam Falzone and Ralph Humphrey. Leviev also wrote additional music for Electric Heart.

Vizzusi tells us that where Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary stops Electric Heart begins, that jazz did not die in the 60s but rather that this was really jazz's most exciting time. The film’s "rich-textured and dramatic" narration is supplied by Mary McKitrick. Vizzusi further explains that, drug-free his whole life, Ellis looked for his high in the unique music he created. He knew that his life would be short, following his diagnosis of a faulty heart valve, and died aged just 44 in 1978. Acclaim for Ellis’s work, quoted by Vizzusi, includes: “Jazz had to Invent a New Term when it came to Don Ellis” (Maynard Ferguson); “The Most Innovative Jazz Orchestra of all time” (Leonard Feather); “One of the Greatest Musicians of the 20th Century” (Downbeat).

Readers will no doubt wish to know more about this documentary and are encouraged to visit its web site linked below.

Link:
DonEllisFilm.com