Jeremy Marre, an English filmmaker who documented music from across the world with hardheaded clarity, died on March 15 at a hospital in London, where he had lived. He was 76.

His son Oliver said the cause was stomach cancer.

Mr. Marre established his reputation in the 1970s and ’80s with “Beats of the Heart,” a 14-part series of hourlong documentaries initially shown on British television and later on public television in the United States. With a minimal camera and sound crew, Mr. Marre visited Jamaican dance halls, Brazilian favelas, Appalachian churches, Egyptian temples, South African workers’ hostels and Bollywood soundstages to film music and musicians on home turf that was often gritty and unglamorous.

The series presented music as inseparable from historical, economic, political, spiritual and cultural pressures, documenting musical events that most outsiders would not know about or even be allowed to attend.