『Peter Barakan’s Music Film Festival』

The classic Jamaican film from 1972, starring Jimmy Cliff as Ivan, who arrives in Kingston from the countryside with dreams of making it as a singer, but who becomes a victim of his circumstances. Possibly the greatest ever soundtrack, stacked with all-star reggae tracks from Jimmy himself, plus Toots & The Maytals, The Melodians, Desmond Dekker et al.

Still going strong at 85, Mavis Staples has been singing professionally since she was in her low teens, first with family gospel group The Staple Singers, who had a series of big hits in the early 70s, and subsequently as a solo artist. This is a lovingly depicted story of her extraordinary life.

Marianne Faithfull, who died this year at 78, became a teenage star in the mid-1960s with a song written for her by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. After a romance with Mick, and a disastrous period as a junkie, she was reborn in the late 70s as a singer of uncommon depth. In this film from 2017 she bares her soul to Sandrine Bonnaire.

Filmmaker Les Blank documented so much of America’s roots music back in the 1970s, when there was not yet a market for it. This film from 1973 takes as its subject Clifton Chenier, the legendary singer and accordionist who embodied the black music of South West Louisiana known as zydeco, and whose centenary is this year.

Another Les Blank film, from 1976, again about accordion players, this time from Texas. The music known variously as Tex-Mex, Norteño and Conjunto takes in everything from fast-paced dance music to sentimental ballads, and all the famous practitioners, including the stupendously talented Flaco Jiménez, who died recently, are represented.

Janis Ian’s two big songs, “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” both with serious social overtones, were hits when she was, respectively, 15 and 24. 50 years on, she reflects on her life from childhood onward, with plenty of archival material that brings across her songwriting talent anew.