Various Artists Play Your Own Thing: A Story of Jazz in Europe

The music documentary Play Your Own Thing provides a comprehensive history of European Jazz. It explores the origins of the USinfluenced Jazz clubs after the Second World War, the first steps independent of American jazz and the various changes of direction that have repeatedly occurred in European jazz in the search for that own voice that European jazz musicians have helped to form. Featuring the great masters of European jazz such as Chris Barber, Jan Garbarek, Juliette Gréco, Stefano Bollani and Till Brönner, to name but a few, the film provides a wealth of styles in Jazz. For his third documentary on jazz, filmmaker Julian Benedikt travelled to a wide variety of European countries in search of an allembracing documentation of European jazz music. His story telling is neither too sophisticated nor does he simply reproduce the known clichés, rather the movie engages its audience with very personal impressions of European jazz, past and present. Accompanied by rarely seen archival