London Screening of Two Jazz Doc Gems: Jazz In Exile – "Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe" + "Cecil Taylor à Paris"

Big Ben

Jazz on Screen at the Barbican, Cinema 1, Sun 16 Nov 2025

Jazz In Exile – Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe & Cecil Taylor à Paris + Intro by Ehsan Khoshbakht

This double bill offers two distinct portraits of ground-breaking American jazz musicians living and working in Europe, each navigating cultural displacement in their own unique way.

Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (1967) offers a lyrical, offstage portrait of a legendary saxophonist in Amsterdam. Ben Webster cooks, films his own life and reflects on the blues. In the film, his music and spirit explored through poetic visuals and intimate moments.

Cecil Taylor à Paris (1968) is a fierce, fast-cut portrait of an avant-garde pianist in Paris, rejecting the European canon and rooting his explosive sound in the Black American experience. The filmmaking mirrors the music’s energy, becoming a bold improvisation of its own.

Together, they reveal what it meant to be a Black jazz artist abroad, displaced not just by geography, but by culture, politics and sound.

* * *

Cecil Taylor à Paris (Gérard Patris, 1968, France, 45 minutes)

Filmed as part of a five-part French television series on modern music, this arresting portrait captures avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor at the height of his expressive powers. Speaking from a grand but timeworn French palace, Taylor – shrouded behind dark glasses – responds to questions about Stockhausen, Bach, and Cage with a simple refrain: 'He doesn’t come from my community.' For Taylor, the locus of innovation lies not in European high culture, but in 'across the track' experience – the lived reality of African-Americans.

As Taylor’s explosive, two-handed performance pushes bebop into the realm of abstract expressionism, the film responds in kind. Patris (with editor Juliette Bort) matches the music’s intensity with sharp, abrupt cuts and dynamic pacing. Text, spoken credits, and visual collage echo the rhythmic improvisation of the Taylor quartet, transforming this short documentary into a fierce audio-visual duet between artist and filmmaker.

Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (Johan van der Keuken, 1967, Netherlands, 33 minutes)

An intimate, inquisitive portrait of legendary tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, filmed between March and June 1967 in Amsterdam, where he would later settle until his death in 1972. Though the title suggests a tribute, van der Keuken's approach digs deeper – offering a poetic meditation on Webster’s sound and spirit. Visual metaphors abound: a conversation about the blues cuts to a knife being sharpened, while a visit to a saxophone factory fades from industrial clatter into the rich tones of Webster’s luscious vibrato.

A former member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Webster is shown offstage – cooking, chatting with his landlady, shooting pool, and filming with his own 8mm camera. When van der Keuken later integrates that footage, jazz and cinema seem to merge, revealing both the vulnerability and quiet dignity of a master musician in self-imposed exile.