The new music documentary Music Pictures: New Orleans, directed by Ben Chace, will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 12, followed by the option of streaming the film globally beginning on June 14.

The film is a rare backstage window into the lives and craft of four New Orleans music legends: Irma Thomas, Little Freddie King, Ellis Marsalis and Benny Jones Sr.

Thomas, a Grammy-winning vocalist known as “The Soul Queen of New Orleans,” has recorded cult classics with James Brown, Allen Toussaint and Swamp Dogg, but she never enjoyed the same degree of international fame of her contemporaries like Aretha Franklin. Jones is the founder of the world renowned Tremé Brass Band and a fixture in the New Orleans jazz community. King is one of the last original bluesmen who at the age of 81 still performs live. Marsalis, the patriarch of the famed jazz family who helped found the modern jazz scene in the 1950s, died on April 1, 2020, from COVID-related pneumonia at the age of 85. He was honored with a jazz funeral two years later.

Special performances by Thomas, King and Jason Marsalis will be held after the premiere screening at The Indeed Theater at Spring Studios at 50 Varick Street in New York. For ticket information, visit here.

The documentary will also be streaming online as part of Tribeca at Home. 

Music Pictures: New Orleans is Chace’s third feature, following Wah Do Dem, which won best narrative at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival, and the 2016 release Sin Alas, which was the first American feature filmed in Cuba since 1959.