This chapter examines relationships between documentary screen-media and jazz from the 1950s to today. As a mode of production which often lays claim to “truth” and “reality,” documentary’s reflexive relationship with jazz is interrogated for its enduring power to keenly shape ideas about both jazz and documentary itself. Concert-films, meta-narrative documentaries, and biographical film are introduced as key repositories of jazz culture that reflect and codify jazz history and meaning. The use of jazz in nonjazz documentaries is also explored as an example of jazz’s integration into screen-media’s cultural vernacular and the aesthetics of the everyday. Throughout the chapter, attention is given to examples in which ideas about jazz and US democracy are propagated through documentary film practice, reception, and aesthetics.