How Damien Chazelle and André Holland capture the bustling Paris jazz scene in 'The Eddy'

Those familiar with the work of Damien Chazelle won't be surprised to hear that his latest project centers on a jazz musician. "The Eddy," a miniseries now streaming on Netflix, follows the Oscar-winning director's "Whiplash" and "La La Land" in exploring the role music plays in the life of its main character, and how professional ambition affects his relationships, some loving and others fraught.

But unlike those films, which take place in the United States, "The Eddy" follows an American in modern-day Paris: fictional pianist Elliot Udo (André Holland), now a struggling jazz club owner who becomes entangled in a crime plot.

The series was a departure for many involved. Chazelle, who directed the first two episodes, had never worked in television. Most of the musicians had never acted. Holland, who only had a bit of piano experience, had to embody someone with a successful career's worth - and believably enough to pay homage to the black American musicians who arrived on the scene decades before his character.

"By the time we got on set, everyone was scared of something," Chazelle says. "André was scared of not coming across like a real musician, the musicians were scared of not coming across as real actors. It was going to be a hodgepodge ... The whole cast kind of agreed to jump off the cliff together."

They leaned on each other, as do their characters. While the band members often fall out of sync in their personal lives, they thrive onstage at Elliot's club, from which the show gets its title. Critics have pointed to the performance scenes as the strongest, showcasing songs written by Glen Ballard, known for co-writing and producing Alanis Morissette's 1995 album, "Jagged Little Pill." Netflix describes the series as a collaboration among Ballard, Chazelle, director Alan Poul and screenwriter Jack Thorne, all of whom are executive producers; as others have noted, marketing materials lack a creator credit. (Chazelle and Poul were joined by Houda Benyamina and Laïla Marrakchi in making up the directing team.)

Within the show, Elliot is also a strict bandleader who presides over practices with a meticulous ferocity. He struggles to keep his life intact, dealing with the external pressures of a failing business, an on-and-off relationship with singer Maja (Joanna Kulig) and the sudden death of a close friend. When his daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg) arrives in Paris, Elliot is forced to look inward and grapple with his persistent sense of grief over losing his son, and with his failure to show up for Julie in the aftermath.

"For me, it was just about trying to identify what Elliot is trying to do, and identifying what's in the way of that," Holland says of his acting approach. "The big thing in his way was grief ... The shame and guilt that he feels in not having been able to save his child, and then the shame around not having been there for Julie when she needed him. All of his failings have him boxed in."

The role called for a combination of what audiences have seen Holland accomplish before: an excavation of deep-rooted emotion, as in Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight," set to the frenetic tone of "High Flying Bird," Steven Soderbergh's film about a quick-moving sports agent.Chazelle adds that, with even the subtlest of looks, Holland can relay "that quiet kind of withholding, that coldness, that raw pain; but also (retains) the ability to be tender, to be sweet, that yearning to connect to more than he can. Those were the core tenets of the character, for us."

As a co-executive producer, Holland had a fair amount of say in shaping "The Eddy." The show presents Paris as it exists to the show's characters, shedding its glitzy skin for a grittier alternative. The actor was also taken by how many cultures collide in the city's music scene, traceable North African influences mingling with what black Americans embedded there after World War II.

Holland says he and Stenberg were passionate about honoring the contributions of those Americans. Elliot gives Julie books on the subject, some of which Holland turned to himself. He read "Blues People: Negro Music in White America," which Amiri Baraka published under the name LeRoi Jones in 1963, and watched "Paris Blues," in which Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman play American musicians in Paris.

"If we're going to tell a story about jazz and have two black characters in the center of it, I felt strongly that we damn well better recognize the real people who made this possible," Holland says.

Elliot's band doesn't perform covers, as Ballard wrote enough original music to sustain eight episodes' worth. But their music pays homage to the vibrant culture black Americans in Paris helped create. It's these performances that bring "The Eddy" to life, the camera whirling around the club as real-life musicians Jowee Omicil and Damian Nueva Cortes's fingers dance across saxophone keys and pluck bass strings, respectively, or as Lada Obradovic's drumsticks bounce off the instrument. (Lead singer Kulig, trumpeter Ludovic Louis and keyboardist Randy Kerber make up the rest of the band.)

"There was something about stepping behind the camera and looking at these players that felt both endlessly compelling and cathartic," says Chazelle, who pursued jazz drumming in his youth before pivoting to film. "It started with the music, and it dictated the whole aesthetic of the show, really."

As the first of the four directors to helm a pair of episodes, Chazelle set the series's "looser shooting style" in place. His camerawork strays from the technique of his well-known films and returns to that of his earliest work, such as his 2009 debut, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench."

"I wanted to return to documentary a little bit, certainly more so than I had done in movies like 'Whiplash' or 'La La Land,' where there was more of a rigid fictional construct that the music was fitting into," he says. "Whether (the 'Eddy' actors) were performing or hanging out in the green room, they would be behaving the way they would as jazz musicians in that context. We would be there to film it like a documentary crew, not knowing exactly what's going to happen and reacting instinctively to it."

Holland adds that working on these scenes was "really dope."

"It's super powerful to watch those musicians work and create those sounds in real time," he says. "Once we did the takes we had to do, sometimes in between the musicians would just start jamming. They might turn the cameras on and catch a bit of that, too. It really started to feel like a club."