“This film should be played loud!” is the title card at the beginning of The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s 1978 concert film featuring The Band. Scorsese raised the music film to a cinematic art form, with top-notch cinematography and a superbly crafted stereo sound mix. Other music films, such as D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, offer a more raw and spontaneous experience, capturing the excitement of live performance and the candid reality of backstage life. And some, such as Richard Lester’s Hard Day’s Night, put a real band into a fictional context. This series features all three of these types of films: concert films, vérité documentaries, and fiction films. What the movies all have in common is that each one focuses on a single performer or band… and all of them are meant to be seen—and heard—in a theater, played LOUD!