Cinema: Blue Notes Over Paris 'round Midnight

Directed by Bertrand Tavernier Screenplay by David Rayfiel and Bertrand Tavernier

None but the French have swum so easily in the rude and mysterious currents of American culture. They found philosophy in our comic strips, published our expatriate novelists, embraced Hollywood movies and dubbed their directors "auteurs." And when the pioneers of bebop pushed jazz away from melody and into the ionosphere of improvisation, French intellectuals were happy to welcome these black American outlaws to Paris after World War II. Bud Powell, the pathfinding bop pianist, settled there in the '50s, made friends and musical history and went a little crazy. Dexter Gordon, a crucial link in tenor-sax bop between Lester Young...

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