Featuring Clark Terry and Justin Kauflin. Rated PG.

If Whiplash was American Sniper with drums, Keep On Keepin’ On is the anti-Whiplash—an inspiring corrective for people who want to be reminded that music doesn’t harm, it heals.

The short, tightly structured documentary came about when Australian drummer Alan Hicks met legendary trumpeter Clark Terry, who is now 94. Then already in his late 80s, the diabetic jazz master began losing his ability to perform, so Hicks—who studied with him at a music school in New Jersey—decided to film the great man, focusing on his lesser-known role as an educator.

Another of Terry’s students was Justin Kauflin, an imaginative and bright-spirited young pianist from Virginia Beach. Shooting over a period of four years, the neophyte director saw a doting relationship develop between his nurturing mentor, whose sight was gradually failing, and the Jewish-Japanese Kauflin, blind since age 11.

Splendid archival footage highlights career milestones of CT, as everyone calls him, from impoverished origins in St. Louis, to stints in the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands, and then work as the first black musician hired by the Tonight Show band. (Shockingly, that was in 1965.) There’s testimony—some archival or merely quoted—from many trumpet-playing admirers, including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Quincy Jones. As a teenager, Q was CT’s first student, and he shows up here as a producer of the finished film, an advocate of Kauflin’s budding talent, and a living embodiment of Terry’s influence as a role model and music-biz pioneer.

Occasionally oversweetened with music by Dave Grusin, the movie alternates between footage of Kauflin at home and travelling, eventually with the help of a seeing-eye dog, and Terry and his endlessly caring wife, Gwen, in their beautiful Arkansas home, which Kauflin visits frequently. Except for a clip of the scat-singing trumpeter’s hit “Mumbles” at the end, Keep On Keepin’ On—a phrase CT utters often—doesn’t really mention his role as a jazz humorist. But it’s obvious in the way he moves so joyfully between words and music, even when suffering painful medical procedures. In the end, the most infectious thing in the master’s long life has been his easy-to-love personality. “I may not know everything about the intricacies of jazz,” Gwen says at one point, “but I definitely know when you’re happy!”