The Gram­my-win­ning 2000 film, The Clash: West­way to the World, is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the rise and fall of one of his­to­ry’s great­est rock bands. The Clash did­n’t invent punk rock–bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pis­tols pre­ced­ed them–but they did their best to rein­vent it, mov­ing beyond the self-absorbed nihilism of the Pis­tols to embrace a more glob­al, polit­i­cal­ly engaged ethos that moshed togeth­er a riot of musi­cal and cul­tur­al influ­ences, includ­ing reg­gae and rap. Per­haps no one was more respon­si­ble for inject­ing those influ­ences into the punk sub­cul­ture than the man who made this movie, Don Letts.

The British-born son of Jamaican immi­grants, Letts ran a cloth­ing bou­tique in West Lon­don in the ear­ly 1970s that became an ear­ly gath­er­ing place for punk rock­ers. He lat­er became the res­i­dent DJ at the first punk night­club, The Roxy, at a time when there weren’t many punk records out, so he played a lot of reg­gae. And he start­ed record­ing the scene. “When the punk rock thing hap­pened in about 1976,” Letts lat­er recalled, “the whole ‘Do It Your­self’ prin­ci­ple came into play. All my mates picked up gui­tars and I want­ed to pick up some­thing too, but the stage was kind of full up. So I picked up a Super 8 cam­era, and using the ‘DIY’ prin­ci­ple, taught myself to become a film­mak­er through film­ing the bands I liked and work­ing out how to do it as I went along. I’d nev­er been to film school; I nev­er even read the instruc­tions for the cam­era!”

The raw, unpol­ished footage was edit­ed togeth­er in 1978 and released as The Punk Rock Movie. Letts went on to make all of the Clash’s videos, and in 1981 when the Clash played their leg­endary 17 nights at Bond’s Inter­na­tion­al Casi­no in Times Square, Letts was com­mi­sioned by the band’s mer­cu­r­ial man­ag­er, Bernie Rhodes, to make a doc­u­men­tary. As music jour­nal­ist Chris Salewicz writes in his book Redemp­tion Song: The Bal­lad of Joe Strum­mer, “after each night’s show he’d be hand­ed a wedge of dol­lars by Bernie and told to buy more film.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Rhodes then placed almost all of Letts’s footage in a stor­age facil­i­ty in New York and for­got to pay the bill. The exposed film was thrown away.

So when Sony lat­er approached Letts to put togeth­er The Clash: West­way to the World, he had to make do with oth­er archival footage and inter­views. In the inter­views, the mem­bers of the band are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly sin­cere in their assess­ment of why the band dis­in­te­grat­ed. When Mick Jones formed Big Audio Dyna­mite in 1984, Letts was invit­ed to join the group. The man who brought reg­gae to punk still could­n’t play a musi­cal instru­ment, so he intro­duced film-edit­ing tech­niques to the music. He became an ear­ly pio­neer of sam­pling, using audio clips from old movies and oth­er sources. “When the oth­ers would be lay­ing down their parts in the stu­dio,” Letts lat­er said of his days with Big Audio Dyna­mite, “I’d be run­ning what was tan­ta­mount to a film fes­ti­val in the green room.”

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In 1958, jaz­z’s place in Amer­i­can cul­ture was chang­ing. It was climb­ing out of the smokey night­clubs and into the sun­ny embrace of the bour­geoisie. A younger force, rock and roll, was start­ing to push it aside. That sense of tran­si­tion is pre­served in Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val.

Kei­th Richards has called Stern’s movie “a para­ble on film of the changeover of pow­er between jazz and rock and roll.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Life, Richards describes his youth­ful pil­grim­age with Mick Jag­ger to see Chuck Berry’s per­for­mance in Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day:

The film had Jim­my Giuf­fre, Louis Arm­strong, Thelo­nious Monk, but Mick and I went to see the man. That black coat. He was brought on stage–a very bold move by someone–with Jo Jones on drums, a jazz great. Jo Jones was, among oth­ers, Count Basie’s drum­mer. I think it was Chuck­’s proud­est moment, when he got up there. It’s not a par­tic­u­lar­ly good ver­sion of “Sweet Lit­tle Six­teen,” but it was the atti­tude of the cats behind him, sol­id against the way he looked and the way he was mov­ing. They were laugh­ing at him. They were try­ing to fuck him up. Jo Jones was rais­ing his drum­stick after every few beats and grin­ning as if he were in play school. Chuck knew he was work­ing against the odds. And he was­n’t real­ly doing very well, when you lis­ten to it, but he car­ried it. He had a band behind him that want­ed to toss him, but he still car­ried the day. Jo Jones blew it, right there. Instead of a knife in the back, he could have giv­en him the shit. But Chuck forced his way through.

Lat­er gen­er­a­tions of jazz lovers have been per­plexed by the film, not because of Chuck Berry, but because of the film­mak­er’s focus on every­thing but the jazz. At one point Thelo­nious Monk is soul­ful­ly play­ing “Blue Monk” when the film sud­den­ly cuts to the Amer­i­ca’s Cup sail­boat race and the jar­ring voice of a radio announc­er describ­ing the scene. Ouch.

Just as painful, in ret­ro­spect, are the omis­sions. The film­mak­er took a pass on per­for­mances at the fes­ti­val that year by Duke Elling­ton, Dave Brubeck, Lester Young, Son­ny Rollins and the Miles Davis Sex­tet. “Yes,” writes Alan Kurtz at Jazz.com about the Davis sex­tet, “the last unit fea­tur­ing Can­non­ball Adder­ley, John Coltrane and Bill Evans was the same super­group as would eight months lat­er record Kind of Blue and of which no motion pic­ture or video footage now exists.” Ouch again.

But Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day is still a won­der­ful film. Stern was one of the great­est adver­tis­ing and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of his gen­er­a­tion. He was a 28-year-old still pho­tog­ra­ph­er when he went to New­port and basi­cal­ly invent­ed the music per­for­mance film genre. While Stern’s com­mer­cial work tends to be care­ful­ly con­trolled, Jazz on a Sum­mer’s Day exhibits the pho­tog­ra­pher’s con­sid­er­able gift for observ­ing peo­ple in their nat­ur­al set­ting. There are many doc­u­ments of the way peo­ple looked in the late 1950s, but few are this vivid. Or this visu­al­ly elo­quent.