I saw this film on its theatrical release, way back in '88/89, as a part of a run of late night movies on jazz themes, screened at the Cambridge Arts Cinema, as it was then known. I was completely enthralled and enchanted. Some films are intensely and self-consciously didactic, or analytical, or escapist, romantic, challenging, soothing or whatever... This film seems to be a wonderfully un-self-conscious mixture of biography, homage, celebration, voyeurism and more besides, all delivered with a dream like whimsy, and an artistic eye for bleak, melancholy beauty. The music is fabulous, both old and new, the performance footage revealing and entertaining, and the panoply of talking heads have a lot of interesting things to say.