Veteran music journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker Nelson George is directing a documentary chronicling the behind the scenes of the iconic Hip-Hop photo re-creation of A Great Day In Jazz. George spoke of his involvement in the historic day in his Nelson George Mixtape newsletter.

"With enthusiasm and no money, I convinced the publisher of XXL to grant me exclusive access to the 126th Street location where Gordon Parks was to shoot," he wrote. "With a small crew I shot 7 hours of video footage on mini-dv cameras. The bulk of that footage has remained unseen. We’ll explore the questions of how did this iconic moment happen? How many actual hip hop artists were in it? How did sunlight determine its final form?

How did two huge stars not end up in the photograph? But the story is much larger than the photograph. Hovering over this event like the stink of death were the murders of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Christopher Wallace aka the Notorious BIG in 1997. Whether directly or obliquely, hip hop figures from around the country referenced the deaths in framing why they participated in the photo shoot."

On September 29, 1998 some of Hip-Hop's greatest artists gathered to recreate an iconic photo. The photo is a re-creation of fashion photographer Art Kane's historic 1958 A Great Day In Harlem, which assembled 57 of jazz music's greatest musicians. The image, shot at 17 East 126th Street was featured in the January '59 issue of Esquire Magazine and included images of Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Count Basie, and more.

Four decades later XXL editor in chief Sheena Lester commissioned A Great Day in Hip-Hop, which was shot by legendary photographer Gordon Parks, and featured 177 artists including Busta Rhymes, Public Enemy, Rakim, Fat Joe, The Wu-Tang Clan, Reverend Run, Slick Rick, Da Brat, and more. The photo became the largest gathering of musicians in a single image in history.