In the Mix: Music & Film—Tony Williams in Africa

Tune in to a sonically inspired series of films documenting the sounds, rhythms, and vibrations that move us to action and change the world, featuring Songs from the Hole and Tony Williams in Africa—films made by, about and through music with screenings accompanied by live performances and conversations.

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Co-presented with Crenshaw Dairy Mart.

Tony Williams in Africa
Willie Ruff, 1973, 16mm, 37 minutes

Willie Ruff’s film about the American jazz drummer Tony Williams traveling to Senegal features Super 8mm footage of Williams and African drummers, as well as a framing section with Ruff, Williams, and pianist Dwike Mitchell presenting the footage on 16mm to local children. As Ruff wrote later, “[i]t took me about a year to finish it, mainly for teaching purposes, and I began using it almost immediately in classes at Yale. Tony saw it then and declared it to probably be the best work of his life. The fact is, he didn’t understand what I was really after during the entire grueling enterprise, until he saw it on the Moviola, and I am told that he never stopped talking about it for the rest of his short life [as] one of his finest musical accomplishments. For me, it was special in every way, for I had wanted to make a film about the talking drum, and its legal removal in all the slave-holding states in America. I had to shoot it myself on Super 8 because my grant from the NEA was so small I couldn’t afford to fly a 16mm camera crew to Africa.”

Preserved at Colorlab from the only extant 16mm print plus 4K scans of the original Super 8mm footage with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2021.