‘Music of John Williams’ would probably have been a joy to watch even if it hadn’t gone as deep into the scoring process as it does: a glorified addition, made especially enjoyable by the way it hits our nostalgic triggers . What makes it special is that it really cares about the details of combining photos with music and understands how to explain the fine points to people who aren’t musicians.

“Music by John Williams” is a Disney+ documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau, who for years has been virtually the official chronicler of the careers of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and other great American filmmakers in their circle. A certain comfort level is evident in interviews with Williams, now 92, as he sits at the same piano on which he has composed scores since the 1960s and guides us through the theory and practice of his work, which extends from TV scores to the sixties. ‘Lost in Space’, incidental music for ‘Gilligan’s Island’, playing piano with the theme ‘Peter Gunn’), through the blockbusters of the 1970s (‘Star Wars’, ‘Jaws’, ‘Superman’ et al.) and beyond into the 21st century (the main theme ‘Harry Potter’, the prequels and sequels of ‘Star Wars’, and more Spielberg films). Williams’ last score before retiring was Spielberg’s cinematic memoir “The Fablemans,” bringing the story of their partnership full circle.

“Music by John Williams” is, in a sense, an official product of and advertisement for Disney, which acquired Lucasfilm (which made Indiana Jones and Star Wars) and which, as a result of the purchase of 20th Century Fox, now also owns of Williams-scored films released by Fox, including the “Home Alone” series and films by Robert Altman, Oliver Stone and others. But it doesn’t work as a stealth informercial for a music catalog wholly owned by a media conglomerate or hedge fund, which is too often the case with recently made documentaries about musicians. And never satisfied, the various interview subjects – including Branford Marsalis, Elvis Mitchell, JJ Abrams and many other film composers, including Thomas Newman and Alan Silvestri – shower Williams with compliments. Once the film gets past its throat-clearing, over-hyped introduction (seemingly mandatory in the age of streaming, unfortunately), it settles into a relaxed and satisfying mode, somewhere between a critical biography of a great American artist and an educational film. tool for anyone who wants to know more about how films are made. It returns to breathlessness at the end, but it feels earned considering the magnitude of Williams’ performance.

Bouzereau maintains a constant emphasis on the practical aspects of filmmaking and film music. He brings in biographical elements when they are important to the timeline of Williams’ development: there are many details about Williams’ relationships with his father, mother, siblings and children, all musicians, and the transformative effect of the loss of his first wife. , actress-singer Barbara Ruick, suffered an aneurysm when she was only 43. But much of it is anchored in Williams sitting at the piano and walking us through the ideas behind some of film’s most artistically, commercially and technically important blockbusters. over the past 60 years, varying the rhythm, emphasis and sometimes arrangement of famous leitmotifs to show how different a famous part of a film would have become if he had changed even one or two elements.

Williams is often joined on screen by Spielberg, his greatest collaborator and an excellent teacher/guide who is almost as eloquent as Williams when it comes to explaining how the filmed image merges with music to create something greater than either alone can achieve. Williams’s scores are sometimes used in clever ways to underscore biographical sections that tie in with the subjects of the films he composed them for (“The Fablemans” is used under the section on Williams’s own childhood and adolescence).

Just as “The Fablemans” puts a new framework around many of Spielberg’s films and makes you want to go back and watch them again, “Music by John Williams” will make you want to listen to his music again, whether as part of a movie. or on its own, and think back to what you have learned here about his life and artistic development.

Williams’s score for Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can,” for example, is not merely a throwback to the brassy, ​​jazz-orchestral work of Elmer Bernstein in the ’50s and ’60s in films like “A Walk on the Wild Side” and ” The Sweet Smell of Success” (Bernstein was one of several great composers who employed the young Williams, to whom the piano part of Bernstein’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” score is credited here). It’s also a reference to Williams’ own more pop-jazz scores for ’60s TV shows that he did under the name Johnny Williams; a connection to his jazzy work for Robert Altman on TV series and films “The Long Goodbye” and “California Split”; and an oblique tribute to his father’s work as a jazz drummer and to being surrounded by jazz players growing up. “My parents’ friends were all musicians,” Williams says, “and I thought that’s what you did when you were grown.”

The jazz factor also comes to the fore in the section on the original 1977 “Star Wars.” Marsalis – who calls Williams’ piano playing on the “Peter Gunn” theme “the foundation of jazz funk” – notes: “It’s hard for to say that someone writes a piece like the cantina scene when you know absolutely nothing about jazz. I’ve heard a lot of bad stuff like that, and it comes across as a clichéd affectation at best.

And of course, the documentary is a parting word for Williams, the last of a breed of film scorers that used to be the norm in Hollywood. Williams emerged in the last decade of the old studio system, the early 1960s, after honing his skills in Air Force bands. His first scoring assignment was a documentary about Canada’s maritime provinces. He has played in studio orchestras at Columbia and 20th Century Fox under the direction of legends such as Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini and Franz Waxman. He still composes the old-fashioned way, without the help of a computer, choosing melodies and themes on his piano and writing graphs in pencil. His grandson Ethan Gruska says, “He’s someone who learned his skills the hard way, and now he lives in a time where you can conjure music from a prompt with AI.”

I’ve been collecting film scores on vinyl for most of my life and have been a fan and student of Williams throughout, but I still learned a lot about his work and the art from watching this film. It’s full of illuminations, like Silvestri’s commentary on Williams’ minimalist piano theme for “Jaws” (“One thing a theme can do brilliantly is it can keep a character on screen even when they’re not visible on screen ‘) and Williams’ analysis of the five-note theme for the aliens in ‘Close Encounters’ (‘like a subjunctive phrase or sentence ending with And, as or But”).

The friendship and partnership between Williams and Spielberg are the backbone of the film and the source of its warmth and much of its humor, as when Williams says he was so moved by a music-free early version of “Schindler’s List” that he told Spielberg to find a better composer, and Spielberg replied, “I know, but they’re all dead.” “Any of his scores would be the achievement of a lifetime for any other composer,” Abrams says. It’s true. At 100 minutes, “Music by John Williams” is too short to delve into one score for very long (it could easily have been a 10-movement series), and as a result, a lot of work is necessarily skipped. But that’s the nature of the beast: you can’t say everything, in words or music, and choices have to be made. Yet this is an essential work not only for Williams, but for many of his fellow composers, role models and film partners, and for filmmaking in general. It will be watched for pleasure and taught in schools. Like a John Williams score, it sticks in your head after the credits roll.