In 1962, at San Quentin, the California state penitentiary by the San Francisco bay, a show is given every Saturday night. The warden has invited several dozen guests to watch a talent show produced by inmates. A big band is playing between numbers by stand-up comics, acrobats, singers, magicians or dancers. The band's members are dressed in tuxedoes cut from the denim cloth of their uniforms and died black. 

    Among them are some of the most brilliant of West coast jazz musicians of the time. Most of them are in for drug-related offences. They play for the Saturday night warden's show, but also on any occasion they can.  During the "music hour" when inmates are free to play, every night. For specially-organised concerts like the annual "creative music festival". In the chapel, in the band room, in the prison yard.

Those musicians, the stars, the sidemen, or the mere amateurs, never played together before meeting in San Quentin. They would never play together after. San Quentin Jazz Band  is also the story of the best jazz that was never recorded.

Let’s introduce each of them, as if at a concert: 

On alto saxophone, Art Pepper, the legendary prodigy of west coast jazz, the former star of Stan Kenton’s big band, leader of the famed session "Meets the Rythm Section", recorded with Miles Davis' men. He’s the only white man of our jazz band. When his prison life begins, he some of his albums are alrady part of jazz history.

On trumpet Dupree Bolton, a brilliant genius that would end homeless, thirty years later, panhandling in San Francisco, having left a handful of records.

 Also on trumpet, Nathaniel Meeks, one of the numerous anonymous sidemen of California’s big bands, whose trace in jazz history has been all but lost.

On piano Jimmy Bunn, the sophisticated and demanding soloist who played with the greatest, including Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Mingus, even before his incarceration, and ended his life in obscurity. 

On alto saxophone, Earl Anderza, who recorded one brilliant record in 1963 during one of his few moments of freedom, then disappeared from the music scene and died in Chicago, all-but-forgotten, twenty years later.

 On alto saxophone also, Frank Morgan, thought to be lost for music after his first recording in 1955, but who came back from the dead thirty years later, his talent intact, after having spent all his adult life in jail. 

On bass Frank Washington, the self-taught amateur who got to play with the greatest, while spending all his music life - ans most of his adult life - behind walls.

San Quentin Jazz Band is their story. Focused around the few months of 1962 when they played together their long-forgotten music. Locked up in San Quentin, the overcrowded prison, a few yards from the gas chamber, with racial tensions were rising as the muted sound of the forces then shaking up America could still be heard...