The BBC Four television channel is planning a jazz weekend later this month with a special raft of programming that includes documentaries about Sonny Rollins and Barbara Thompson among its highlights.The opening evening is to include a significant new documentary film about Sonny Rollins, the focus of the long running Arena documentary strand, to be broadcast on Friday 17 February at 9pm. The film, Beyond The Notes, directed by Dick Fontaine, features footage from Rollins’ Beacon Theatre 80th birthday concert filmed in New York when Rollins was joined for the first time on stage by free jazz avatar Ornette Coleman on one of Rollins’ signature tunes, ‘Sonnymoon For Two’.

Older footage finds Rollins, known to his fans as ‘Newk’ after baseball player Don Newcombe who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s and 50s, performing with both Charlie Parker and Miles Davis in the early part of his career, and also focuses on the most famous sabbatical in jazz when a reclusive Rollins was caught woodshedding out of the general music public’s eye but not out of sight, on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge in 1968.

Beyond the Notes follows many years on from Fontaine’s 1960s documentary Who is Sonny Rollins? Now head of the documentary department at the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire, Fontaine was a pioneer of cinéma vérité in the UK and in the earlier part of his career wrote and directed for the agenda setting World in Action current affairs series. He also went on to produce documentaries about the Black Panthers and the civil rights movement, and in the 1980s directed the documentary Beat This: A Hip-Hop History.

The BBC Four jazz weekend opening night also includes a concert film featuring a rarely seen live performance from the 1970s, titled Arena: Sonny Rollins ’74 – Rescued!

The weekend, the details of which have not been fully confirmed by the BBC, also includes on Sunday 19 February the documentary Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time. To be aired at 9pm the hour-length documentary is directed by Mike Dibb, well known for his Emmy winning film The Miles Davis Story. Dibb’s film explores saxophonist Thompson’s battle with Parkinson’s disease, and features Thompson and her husband, the Colosseum drummer Jon Hiseman. The film spans five years of Thompson’s living with Parkinson’s and her search for suitable treatment. 

– Stephen Graham

For more on Playing Against Time see Selwyn Harris’ feature in the February print issue of Jazzwise out now. The March issue, published later this month, includes an additional feature in the Jazz on Film slot about Beyond The Notes