Midway through “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the new Netflix drama based on August Wilson’s acclaimed stage play, the title character drifts into a monologue. “White folk don’t understand about the blues,” muses Rainey (Viola Davis), an innovator at the crossroads of blues and jazz with an unbending faith in her own expressive engine

They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there,” she says as she readies herself to record in a Chicago studio in 1927. “They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better, you sing because that’s your way of understanding life.”

Time seems to roll to a stop as Rainey speaks. The divide between her words and what white society is ready to hear lays itself out wide before us. That, you realise, is the fertile space where her music exists — an ungoverned territory, too filled with spirit, expression and abstention for politics and law to interfere.

But maybe this scene is only so startling because of how rare its kind has been throughout film history. The movies have hardly ever told the story of jazz through the lens of Black life.

Now, inexcusably late, that is beginning to change.

Piloted by veteran theatre director George C Wolfe, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is one of three feature films released this holiday season that centre on jazz and blues; all were made by Black directors or co-directors. The other two are New York City stories: “Sylvie’s Love,” by Eugene Ashe, a midcentury romance between a young jazz saxophonist and an up-and-coming TV producer, and “Soul,” a Pixar feature directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Kemp Powers that uses a pianist’s near-death experience to pry open questions about inspiration, compassion and how we all navigate life’s endless counterpoint between frustration and resilience.

The films present Black protagonists in bloom — musically, visually, thematically — giving these characters a dimensionality and a depth that reflects the music itself. It calls to mind Toni Morrison’s explanation for why she wrote “Jazz,” her 1992 novel: She wanted to explore the changes to African American life wrought by the Great Migration — changes, she later wrote, “made abundantly clear in the music.”

The new films outrun many, though not all, of the issues dogging jazz movies past, which have historically done a better job contouring the limitations of the white gaze than showing where the music springs from or its power to transcend. White listening and patronage don’t really enter these new films’ narratives as anything other than a distraction or necessary inconvenience.