That's My Jazz
Milt Abel II grew up as the son of a well-known jazz musician, and this short film has him looking back on what that childhood actually looked like from the inside. He remembers being pulled backstage and into rehearsal rooms most fans never saw, watching his father move between the stage persona and the parent he knew at home. The film stays close to Abel's own memories and voice rather than building a broad history of jazz, using his recollections to trace what it meant to absorb a music career secondhand, as a kid tagging along rather than a performer himself. It runs a tight fourteen minutes, more a personal remembrance than a survey, and its value is in the specificity of one family's experience of life around the music rather than any larger claim about the genre.