‘Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music’

At the risk of broaching a slight spoiler alert, in the final of eight episodes of the remarkable new music doc series Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, Sir George Martin offers a tidy summation: “We’ve had 100 years of recorded music, and we’ve seen its effect on people. It’s changed our lives.” St. Vincent seconds the motion, noting that “the power of music will always be massive.” True, that.

What makes these statements more than idle clichés is the seductive weight of evidence so beautifully produced and woven together in this panoramic PBS series. Directed by Jeff Dupre and Maro Chermayeff, Soundbreaking deftly assembles smartly edited archival material and footage with talking-head interviews with writers and musicians, including crisply edited wisdom from an articulate Jeff Beck, Brian Eno, DJ Spooky, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Roger Waters, Rick Rubin, Annie Lennox, and countless others. The series has sufficient audacity and authority to claim “this is the story of popular music over the past century, in eight hours” (classical music is passed by, and jazz only briefly touched on, mostly in the form of Miles Davis’s iconic LP Kind of Blue).

For Beatle-maniacs alone, delving into the still-beguiling legacy and period minutiae of pop’s greatest band is worth the price of admission. Sir George Martin took this Liverpudlian band of untrained but ever-curious geniuses and upped the sophistication on their last handful of albums, with free experimentation, orchestration, and studio-as-creative-toolbox notions. Sir George sadly passed away this year, and the series is dedicated to him, but as a central important producer and imprimatur in the project, he left us with something of looming inspiration on the small screen.