Music for the movies

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Synopsis On today’s date in 1927, the landmark film The Jazz Singer received its premiere showing at the Warner Theater in New York. The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson and is usually credited with being the first “talkie” — the first motion picture to successfully incorporate prerecorded music and spoken dialogue. Both the music and dialogue were recorded using the Vitaphone process, essentially a set of disc recordings synchronized for playback with the film’s projector. The previous year, the New York Philharmonic had participated in the first Vitaphone projects, recording Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture as the first music video and performing the soundtrack for the otherwise silent drama Don…