Rhapsody Films

Was Benny Carter too talented for his own good? He did so many things so well - composing, arranging; playing alto saxophone, trumpet, clarinet; leading bands; teaching (at Princeton, no less). Such multiple talents meant he didn't get credit for doing one thing superlatively to the exclusion of everything else (though considering that Charlie Parker and Johnny Hodges were his sole superiors on alto, "exclusion" is a relative term). As a result, few outside of the jazz community recognize his name - this despite Carter's having been a Kennedy Center honoree, as well as the recipient of a Grammy lifetime achievement award and the National Medal of Arts.

Among the pleasures afforded by Harrison Engle's 1989 documentary, "Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs," is the attention it brings to a very important and still-underappreciated figure in jazz history. Paying tribute on-camera are Ella Fitzgerald, Andre Previn, and Quincy Jones, who hails Carter's trailblazing as the first African-American to work steadily as a composer and arranger for movies and TV. But none of them is as compelling as Carter, who died in 2003. With his moon face, neat white mustache, and bald head, he looks like a sweeter, smarter version of the top-hat-wearing man in Monopoly.

We see Carter, still vigorous and extremely charming at 82, in a surprisingly large number of settings for a 58-minute film. He tours Japan and plays a jazz cruise. He pays a visit to the Apollo Theatre. At a recording session, he shows off his astonishing purity of tone. He performs at a Greenwich Village club, where it's a welcome surprise to find his pianist is the late James Williams, who was such a vital presence on the Boston jazz scene during the '70s.

Engle skillfully intercuts archival material with all this contemporary footage, and much of the old black-and-white film - of Harlem in the '20s, Paris and London in the '30s (emigrating for several years, Carter helped popularize jazz in Europe), Los Angeles in the '40s and '50s - is gorgeous. The narration gets a bit hokey, even adulatory, something not helped by Burt Lancaster's overemphatic line readings. Still, this is that rarest of documentaries: one a viewer wishes were much longer.