Once Upon A Time In Vietnam (2013)

Once upon a time, for a few years at the dawn of the 21st century, Avenue C in New York City's East Village had its own Zubin Mehta, its own Herbert Von Karajan, its own Daniel Barenboim. He was a veteran of both the Vietnam War and, even more heroically, NYC's avant-garde jazz scene. His name was Lawrence "Butch" Morris and he was a well-established legend. The orchestra he conducted and the repertoire they played differed considerably from those employed by the above-named gentlemen in style, substance, tools and content. It was a motley crew of musicians from a wide array of backgrounds, styles, disciplines and genres, and the music he drew out of them, far from a set-in-stone catalog of well-established pieces from the European classical tradition, was informed by jazz improvisation, feeding off of the electricity of the streets around them and spontaneously creating the sound of NOW, on the fly and out of thin air, brought to life by each exacting stroke of Butch's baton. Each performance was a unique moment never to be repeated and there were no "hits" you were guaranteed to hear.