The Wizard of Waukesha

An hour-and-a-bit long documentary on one of the true giants of the twentieth century, jazz guitar virtuoso and inventor Les Paul.

Attention, hepcats

"Art Ford's Jazz Party", circa sometime in the '50s.

Found on Chime.tv, which is most definitely the new hotness of Internet video sites.

Satchmo and the Man in Black

Johnny Cash & Louis Armstrong doing "Blue Yodel No. 9" on the Johnny Cash show, 1970. Louis played trumpet on the original Jimmie Rodgers version of this tune in the '30s.

[via making light]

Nighthawk blog post (from Easy Street)

Tom Waits performing "The One That Got Away", animation directed by John Lamb. I'll let the original YouTube page describe it:

An animated film starring Tom Waits.
Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped - a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live
action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each
take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation.

A total of 5500 live action frames were hand traced, caricatured, re-drawn, hand inked and painted onto celluloid acitate cels. Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent and was created specifically for a video music market that didn't yet exist . But the buzz was out and we went on to create what arguably may be the first music video created for the new and upcoming MTV market.

[via mefi] [warning: animated nudity]