Kevin Whitehead

Many jazz fans hate biopic films, but critic Kevin Whitehead likes noticing which true elements get in — or get left out — as messy lives are squeezed into stock-story formulas.

Over 90-some years of movies about jazz, many films have spun a familiar lick, sometimes falling back on stock standards when inspiration fails, and sometimes knowingly quoting from older works.

Lucian Ban, John Surman and Mat Maneri bring a fresh treatment — and musical chemistry — to the bare-bones folk transcriptions of the 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.