Sam Rivers Sessionography

Feature Documentary about an American Master

Jazz musician Sam Rivers is the very definition of the unknown American master — and now, more than a decade after his passing, the tireless work of one dedicated fan is finally bringing him the recognition he deserves.

Fifth Column Films is producing a feature-length documentary about Rivers based on the incredible 764-page Sessionography created by obsessed fan and archivist Rick Lopez.

Sam Rivers was born into a family of musicians, proud Black preachers, educators and gospel singers who taught him to make his own way in the world. As an adult, Rivers flowered into an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and influential composer who toured and recorded with the finest musicians in the world, including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Cecil Taylor, and many others. 

But those credits are merely the most blatant headlines in a career that is not so easily defined. In addition to his status as a revered sideman, prolific composer and genius arranger, Rivers also recorded as a band leader for Blue Note, Impulse!, and other important jazz labels.

In his early recording days he wrote “Beatrice,” which has since become a beloved jazz standard. The song is named for Rivers’ steadfast wife and business partner Beatrice, whose dedication was a key factor in Studio RivBea’s success as a cornerstone of the thrilling 1970s downtown New York Loft era. Rivers became a defining figure of this scene, a Petri dish for cross-disciplinary artistic experimentation that helped redefine American culture for decades to follow.

Rivers toured the world through the ‘80s and ‘90s, then set up a new base in Orlando, Florida, where he created a big band made up of musicians who were bored with their day jobs at Disney World. He arranged original songs for the all-new edition of the RivBea Orchestra, all the while writing countless new tunes, as well. In his last years, his energetic, unpredictable live performances made him something of a rock star to whole new generations of music lovers who may never have listened to jazz before.

Sam Rivers, mentor to Tony Williams and Jason Moran, contemporary of John Coltrane in every sense of the word, held the jazz universe in his fingertips. And yet it appears he is in danger of being forgotten entirely by all but jazz academics.

Enter Rick Lopez, a fan who readily admits to obsessive tendencies when it comes to his tastes. For Lopez, it wasn’t enough to merely collect all of Rivers’ records and travel to see him live; his passion drove him to spend more than 20 years creating and publishing a 768-page “sessionography,” an exhaustive attempt to catalog every incidence in which Sam Rivers ever played jazz in public, the personnel with whom he played, the set list, and any related anecdotes he can find. It is the story of a life as pieced together from lists, and flyers, and stories from friends. Lopez’s archive also includes recordings of Sam in nightclubs, at Studio RivBea, doing radio interviews, teaching class, sharpening up his band — whichever band it happened to be at that time.

The book is a remarkable feat that feels insane when you first see it. But as you read, and listen to the music, the words and pictures and sounds start to converge in ways that make them inseparable. The songs become embedded in the context provided by the stories until eventually it’s clear that you’ve gained a completely new understanding of both.

Sam Rivers was a virtuoso whose musical thinking was so far ahead of his time many of us are still catching up. Rick Lopez is the biographer he deserves — restless, meticulous, and inventive, just like his hero. The unique flowering of their individual minds has created a universe of art appreciation, with its own physics and laws of gravity, that makes for the perfect gateway into the life of an undersung American master.

The Sam Rivers archive includes thousands of images, hundreds of audio recordings and compositions, and dozens of video recordings. The film will utilize and highlight this deep well of material, but we don’t want it to feel like a book-on-tape. 

Our plan is to partner with Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida, where Sam spent the last years of his life. We will select 10 unheard compositions from the archive and make recordings in the University studios with local musicians who played in the RivBea Orchestra. Those recordings will be combined to make a new Sam Rivers release, and they will be the primary source material for the score of the film. Using the composition pages we will quantify harmonic rhythms in the music and translate them into the edit of the film, particularly the b-roll. The concept will be more obvious in some places, and more subtle in others, but should provide a subconscious linking of the music and images that flows in waves like the free jazz and big band compositions Sam loved.

We will also use brief animations on some still images and still image transitions to accent particular emotions that were captured in the originals, or to lend a sense of motion (or indeed chaos) where appropriate. Sam’s music is often densely layered, and may not jibe with a slow push on an old black & white photo. 

The interviews and b-roll we’re capturing for the film are beautiful but locked off, simple postcards to act as a respite for the mind, and as counterpoints to the scattered imagery in the archive. 

Finally, we intend to work with the post-audio team who created the soundscape for When I Close My Eyes (Independent Lens, 2024), a hypnotic dreamscape-as-documentary that featured a coherent, continuous audio backdrop. It is an audacious, experimental, and painstaking process that deserves to be compared to Sam’s most ambitious compositions, or to Lopez and his Sessionography. The team will use individual stems from the Full Sail recording to build a world full of sounds that happen between the songs, mimicking the mind of a musician in constant conversation with the world around him.