The Blue Note All-Stars, as seen in Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes (Mira Films)

This is a well-shot, somewhat perfunctory documentary that is as smooth as smooth jazz. There is hardly a bump in the road or much of a conflict in sight. It’s a love letter to the Blue Note Records, with nothing but positive things to say about the greatest jazz label and its roster of immense, game-changing talent.

Framed as a celebration of the label, the film juxtaposes a recording session with current Blue Note artists, with an assist from Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, with a chronological history of the company, which means viewers see rare footage of Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, among many others.

It also does an excellent job tracing the history of jazz, as many of its practitioners rotated through Blue Note at one point or another. So we get a primer on Dixieland and how that evolved into bop and then hard bop and so on and so forth. It particularly highlights well how jazz, like the blues, reflects the hardships of the mostly African American performers and composers in the 1950’s and ’60’s, from the anguish of segregation to the celebration of black consciousness during the black power movement.

The label was started in 1939 by two German friends, Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion, who escaped from Nazis Germany. They bonded over a mutual love of jazz and started a label essentially to record what they loved, with no expectation of financial reward. Unlike the Chess brothers, owners of blues stalwart Chess Records, these guys were loved by their artists. They treated musicians with respect, never told them what to play, and paid them for rehearsal, which was unheard of at the time.

There are several illuminating anecdotes: how upset Wolff became when his landmark photographs of studio sessions were cropped to fit album covers, how embarrassed Herbie Hancock was when he flubbed a chord in concert, and how Miles Davis turned it around. There’s a lot of fascinating information here. The problem is that the musicians who deserve (and occasionally have been served with) documentaries of their own get about five minutes on screen before the movie moves on to the next guy. There’s a lot of history at Blue Note Records, and a 85-minute documentary can’t really fit all that in.

Obviously, the modern-day footage of current artists on the roster discussing their relationship with the label and their influences can’t really compare with the archival footage and the interviews of veteran musicians who actually recorded there. The input of the contemporary artists takes up a good amount of screen time, which leaves us thirsting for more of the classic, archival material.

Director Sophie Huber moves things along briskly and smartly, but I miss the shambolic feel of her previous film, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction. That documentary gave us a deep, involved look at a fascinating actor. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is infinitely crisper but ultimately less involving. As it is, we feel like a stone skipping across the water, skimming the surface but never delving into the depths.