Andrea Motis is a Spanish singer and instrumentalist who gained international visibility as a jazz performer in the last decade. She moved her first steps in the music world as a member of the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, a youth band created in 2006 by Joan Chamorro within the municipal school of music of Barcelona as a combo class for children and teenagers whose age ranged between six and eighteen. Not only did this project represent a crucial element in Motis’ educational process, but it was also the launching pad of her mediatised life. The Catalan director Ramon Tort noticed her during the shooting of the film documentary A film about kids and music. Sant Andreu Jazz Band (2012). In the following years Tort tracked Motis’s footsteps with his camera, witnessing her access to the network of international jazz musicians. In 2018, he finally realised Andrea Motis. La trompeta silenciosa. Una història sobre el tromf de la senzillesa (Andrea Motis. The silent trumpet. A story about the success of simplicity). The film won several awards at international festivals, including the awards for best documentary and for best music at the Girona Film Festival, and the audience award at the Memorimage, International Film Festival of Reus. In 2019, it was commercialised on DVD and, since 2020, it is available on the Amazon Prime platform.

Unlike Tort’s previous documentary on the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, which revolved around a single concert at the 43^rd International Jazz Festival in Barcelona (2011), in Andrea Motis musical performances are only a small part of a broader story centred on Motis’ multifaceted character. The film follows a trajectory that begins with the foundational experience of Motis within the band led by her mentor Chamorro, and comes to an end with her presentation as a teacher and as an autonomous leading figure. In a long processional sequence in the woods, we watch Motis at the head of another kids’ orchestra led with her partner, in an itinerant musical performance of a piece composed by her (Save the Orangutan).

The film on the beginning of Andrea Motis’ international career offers a portrait of the former child prodigy jazz musician breaking age and gender barriers and distinguishing herself onstage and backstage. We also see snapshots of her professional and personal life—travelling, dressing up for concerts, doing interviews, rehearsing, chatting with colleagues and friends, listening to music, recording, studying and teaching, reading messages and writing letters, knitting and dancing. These segments help to capture the musician’s life in its simple “ordinariness” rather than in its exceptional glamour. Through a frank engagement with the multiplicity of her interests, work commitments and everyday activities, the film offers a composite and open-ended portrait of Motis. But it also explores how jazz music and its audiovisual representation shape Motis’ musical persona in a constant balancing act between local and global perspectives, between musical professionalism and non-musical experiences.

Andrea Motis adopts elaborate sound editing patterns opening up the nondiegetic domain, without, however, ever resorting to an original music score or Motis’ pre-existing recordings. Indeed, Tort exploits the songs interpreted by Motis, mostly from live performances inserted during the documentary, as narrative devices cutting across different diegetic levels. Motis’ repertoire varies from famous jazz standard such as Summertime to Latin songs like How Insensitive or Ai Que saudade do meu amor, via such original pieces such as If You Give Them More. Her trumpet and singing “voice” gain an audiovisual autonomy beyond the materiality of the mediatised performance, setting alternatives paths of signification that relocate her voice within cinematic discourse.

The construction of the performer’s agency is carried out on several levels, most immediately through Motis’ live performances or teaching moments (such as the tutoring of young students). Those segments of the film allow us to witness her musical style and approach to interpersonal relationships. However, Motis’ agency also shines forth in reflexive sequences that play with the nature of the medium. The clearest example is the use of footage shot directly by Motis herself with a “dirty” and “retro” visual grain. Reminiscent of Super 8mm film, this footage shows her point of view while travelling for work. Consisting primarily of point of view shots, these images offer us an alternative view that rehabilitates the operative and narrative capacity of Motis herself, the object and subject of the cinematic representation. Another example is the employment of her songs in such a way as to invoke a grey area between traditional scoring and voice-over. Voice-over has always been a charged issue, all the more so in documentary filmmaking. Most critiques can be traced back to Bill Nichols’ “expository mode” which “emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative logic” (Nichols Reference Nichols2010:31). It is no coincidence that the traditional framing of voice-over as a sort of “voice of God” has been closely associated to the patriarchal and masculine order underlying its use. Tort’s documentary clearly avoids this normative model by adopting fragments from Motis’ diaries, read by the musician herself, as voice-over. But he also opts to entrust Motis’ singing with the task of commenting images, thereby contriving a hybrid expressive channel, halfway between the verbal and the instrumental domains.

This modality is especially apparent in the music that introduces the documentary during the opening credits. The process of approaching the leading character takes place through a series of blurry, almost indecipherable shots of Motis as she knits. All along, her voice intones The Nearness of You, which expresses a sense of intimacy both through the lyrics and her performance style. This use foreshadows the role of her “singing voice-over” and its relationship to the images to which it is associated. On the one hand, the voice fulfills a descriptive role typical of the conventional use of the “divine” voice-over (as, for example, when we hear Motis singing Ain’t No Sunshine as she walks the streets of a sunny New York, or Summertime when enjoying the contemplative quiet before the sea). On the other hand, the use of her voice modulated as a singing medium plays an empowering function for Motis herself, as a female performer offering her particular point of view on the world through her music.

Conversely, considering the shifting balance between singing and instrumental playing, the ambiguity between singing as score and singing as voice-over also characterises the segments of the film in which Motis plays instrumental standards. Her trumpet resonates beyond the concert venue to function as an alternative (instrumental) voice-over. These audiovisual strategies define Motis’ musical identity as a hybrid performer and convey how her “voices” can inform and transform non-musical venues.

The relativisation of the voice-over status pursued by Tort reaches its peak in the film’s last track, My Favourite Things. Made famous by the musical The Sound of Music (1959), the song has been performed as a standard throughout jazz history, especially after its appropriation by John Coltrane. Motis’ rendition is synchronised with three different sequences in parallel editing: a live performance with Chamorro, at the baritone sax, and the Simfonica Del Valles Orchestra, conducted by Rubén Gimeno; footage from a studio recording session of the song with Motis at the microphone and Chamorro and others behind the mixing console; and one of Motis’ ballet lesson, where her face expresses transparent enjoyment. In the first two cases, the piece comes across as diegetic without, however, indicating which of the versions we are listening to (the studio version or to the live one?). The impossibility of clearly distinguishing the actual source of emission of the piece is also functional to what seems to be the proper accompanying function of the piece. As a score to the ballet lesson, Motis’s singing voice-over expresses her performative ability––in the Austinian sense of the term––to carve her own way—as a singer, trumpetist, and stage performer—to feel and to live jazz music. Motis’s list of favourite things intervenes as a sound curtain to her last words: “It’s clear to me that I play music because I enjoy it a lot, not because I seek fame. I don’t think about what may come. I’d like to think I’ll still be free to choose.”