Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 4 [From the Archives with Revisions]

© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Many critics who took exception to the Murray-Marsalis-Crouch ideological approach to the subject matter had praise for the film at a technical level. Not so Robert Parker, the brilliant Australian jazz scholar and recording engineer who a few years ago did the remarkable restorations of 1920s jazz in quite convincing stereo, issued on CDs by the BBC. Parker, who now lives in England, wrote me:

“A friend has sent me the first three episodes of the Ken Burns PBS Jazz series. I was horrified.

The picture quality is excellent. Little care, however, was taken with much of the early silent film material, which was not slowed down to correct viewing speed — easy to accomplish in these days of vari-speed tape replay, and de rigeur for all UK historical productions. The resulting pixilation of the action is an insult to the era depicted.

The sound quality of the historic jazz recordings is, frankly, appalling. On a budget reported to be $5 million there is no excuse for this. There are now around a dozen sound engineers, several working in the USA, who could have produced superb reproductions from this source material.

But even worse — where was the jazz? Buried behind endless, turgid voice-over and talking head interviews, that's where. And all too often, not even the right jazz. Burns must rate early jazz so lowly, or understand it so poorly, that it took him until near the end of episode three to let us hear any of these master-works under discussion in full — West End Blues.

All well and good, perhaps, if what we were hearing from the pundits was a deathless revelation of the heart and soul of jazz. What we got was reasonably factually correct, true, but laced with so much needless hype and turgid political correctness and so endlessly repetitive as to become, ultimately, just plain boring. I mean, how long does it take to say "jazz is an amalgam of European and African culture, is largely improvised, comes straight from the heart and soul and is a great force in the world for racial social justice and general enjoyment and life enhancement"? Four hours?

If only Burns had musical as well as social perception he might have realized that the heart and soul of jazz is the music. West End Blues said more in three minutes than all the talking heads laid out in line from New Orleans to Chicago to New York and back. And if you don't understand it, from just hearing it, all that explanation will make not a whit of difference to your ability to feel the emotion being transmitted from Armstrong's amazing brain to your own poor instrument.

My friend's fourteen-year-old watched the first ten minutes or so of episode one and then left the room. Later, asked why, he replied, "No music."”

Inevitably, whenever there is a travesty — and the Burns series is nothing less — laughter eases the pain.

Claudio Slon is an outstanding Brazilian (although he was born in Argentina) percussionist, who was with Sergio Mendes for several years. This went zipping along the e-mail circuit:

Announcing Claudio Slon's PBS 12 Part Series "Samba"

Part 1: Creation of Samba by White East African tribes.

Part 2: Arrival of tribes in Brazil.

Part 3: Commercialization of music by Portuguese sailors.

Part 4: Milton Nascimento and social unrest.

Part 5. Accidental discovery of Bossa Nova by Stan Getz.

Part 6: Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong's influence

in Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave.

Part 7: Louis Armstrong.

Part 8: Luis Bonfa and racial tensions.

Part 9: Louis Armstrong.

Part 10: Louis Armstrong, Barbra Streisand, and Dindi.

Part 11: Louis Armstrong.

Part 12: (last ten minutes, if enough time left) Heitor

Villa-Lobos, Guerra Peixe, Pixinguinha, Tom Jobim, Edu

Lobo, Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi, Noel Rosa,

Milton Nascimento, Marcos Valle, and a special tribute

to  Louis  Armstrong,  Stanley  Crouch,  and  Wynton

Marsalis by Sergio Mendes and Brazil '01.

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 3 [From the Archives with Revisions]

© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Another interesting piece of artistic criticism appeared in The Weekly Standard, a publication that normally occupies itself with politics. But then, there was never a more political polemic than Jazz, and so perhaps the piece is not an inappropriate subject for its pages. It was written by Diana West. Raised by parents with a love for jazz and the American song, she studied classical piano, was educated at Yale, worked at the Washington Times as reporter and feature writer, and freelanced for the Washington Post, Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal and other publications. She currently writes editorials for the Washington Times and has a column distributed nationally by Scripps Howard.

By Diana West

“Louis Armstrong was a great trumpet player, a major jazz innovator, and a widely loved entertainer. But was he the Second Coming? This is the hardly exaggerated implication of Ken Burns' Jazz documentary, and it's one well worth pondering — not for what it says about the great Satchmo, but for what it says about a tightly blinkered view of history and race that has come to dominate the presentation of music in America.

Burns is an admitted musical neophyte. But he found as mentors the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writers Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early, and Albert Murray, who anchor the commentary for the nineteen-hour documentary Burns has now produced. They also provide the thematic core of the book Jazz, which has been published in tandem with the documentary's PBS premiere.

The average viewer might expect of these men both a helping hand in introducing the novice to a new life of listening pleasure and, at the same time, apt historical and musical context for the devotee. But their role in the Burns documentary proves quite different. Rather than helping viewers to hear the rich and varied history of jazz, they are there to instruct us in how to see it: the exclusive domain of the black, blues-oriented musicians who have long suffered at the hands of the white and derivative interloper.

It's an old story, but there's something freshly shocking about watching it unfold — unchecked, even unremarked upon — as a matter of uncontroversial fact, "proven" by the seeing-is-believing conventions of documentary making: the grainy photos and film clips, the talking heads, the soothing voice-over narration, and the marvelous music (which is, by the way, all too often voiced-over by those talking heads). The result is a vigorous exercise in political correctness, a distortion of cultural history that only deepens racial division while ill-serving the music it sets out to celebrate. Even more dispiriting is the fact that Ken Burns passed up a genuine opportunity to showcase one of the only organically and expansively multi-cultural movements in American history — the evolution of jazz.

Of course, neither Burns nor his mentors see the music that way. Where there was an unprecedented mixing of musical forms and colors a century or so ago, they see near-isolated black creativity. Where there was a blending of black rhythmic virtuosity with European harmonic sophistication, they see black musical separateness. As various musicologists have reminded us, what became a bona fide American musical vernacular in the twentieth century emerged from a complex cacophony: Negro spirituals and blues, Caribbean dances, Methodist hymns, North Country modal ballads, cowboy round-up tunes, gallops, hornpipes, polkas, "nationality" tunes from Europe, Victorian ballads — not to mention the national craze for brass bands, and the emergence of Tin Pan Alley. But this historic, eclectic mix remains out of earshot of Jazz. The essence of this documentary is blues, the blacks who played those blues, and the whites who tried to play them and couldn't.

Such a point of view, as noted several years ago by Terry Teachout in a searing commentary about the racial cleansing of Jazz at Lincoln Center, stems from what may be called the "racialist" school of jazz theory. Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis — joined in Jazz by Early and, of course, Burns  — all enthusiastically subscribe to it. Teachout defined this outlook as "an ideology in which race is a primary factor in the making of aesthetic judgments." At New York City's Lincoln Center, under the direction of Marsalis and Crouch, the racialist ideology has played out in a series of jazz programs based on the work of black players, composers, and arrangers. In Ken Burns' Jazz, it has been codified for the general audience.

It couldn't be otherwise, given the guides Burns has selected. Albert Murray is the author of Stomping the Blues, a 1976 explication of jazz as an outgrowth of the blues, which was ardently praised by Stanley Crouch as "the first real aesthetic theory of jazz." The book might also be called the jazz racialist's bible. You can get its flavor from the fact that Murray's single assessment of white jazzmen occurs in a perfectly poisonous caption accompanying a photograph of a few white and several black musicians. Murray derides the whites — among them Miff Mole, Gene Krupa, Bud Freeman, and Gerry Mulligan — as members of the so-called "third line," a play on New Orleans parade lingo, suggesting worthless followers and hangers-on. This isn't respectable music criticism; it's racially charged invective.

If anything, Gerald Early is even more direct. "The greatest practitioners of this kind of music have been African American," he states in the documentary. "It comes from a particular kind of American experience with democracy, with America, with capitalism, with a whole bunch of other stuff." To accept this point of view requires the strict segregation of all black musicians from white musicians — ranking Cootie Williams, Art Blakey, and Thelonious Monk above Harry James, Buddy Rich, and Mel Powell. It calls to mind a famous 1950s color-blind test the critic Leonard Feather gave trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who had claimed he could tell a jazz player's race just by listening; Eldridge incorrectly guessed the race of almost every musicians who was played for him. It may be possible to perform the kind of subjective ranking of master musicians that Jazz attempts, but there is something perverse about doing it entirely by racial bloc, which is what Jazz forces the viewer to do.

Consider Wynton Marsalis's shameful explanation that Benny Goodman's white skin — not the electrifying clarinet playing, and certainly not his part in launching the big-band era — earned him the title the "King of Swing." "The majority of people who bought the records were white," says Marsalis (who is to Jazz what Shelby Foote was to Burns' Civil War series: the touchstone commentator for the duration). "The majority of the people who wrote about it were white, the record companies were owned by whites. Just the music came out of the Afro-American community. So it stands to reason that the 'King' would be white." Just in case a viewer doesn't get the full import, Burns cuts wordlessly to a vintage portrait of Duke Ellington, whose place in the racialist theory of jazz is that of the legitimate but denied monarch.

To uphold this and other unabashedly racialist theories, Burns' commentators must boost black musicians to heights beyond reach and denigrate white musicians to mediocrity. Which brings us back to Louis Armstrong and his role in the documentary. It bears repeating: Louis Armstrong was a great trumpeter, a major jazz innovator, and widely beloved entertainer. But was he, as viewers are informed, "a gift from God"? "America's Bach, Dante, and Shakespeare"? The creator of "the melodic, rhythmic vocabulary that all of the big bands wrote music out of? The creator of "some of the most abstract and sophisticated music that anybody has ever heard, short of Bach"? Someone with "an unprecedented sense of rhythm"? "The greatest musician in the world"? Is it true, as Burns writes in the series' accompany book, that "Louis Armstrong is to twentieth-century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics, Freud is to psychiatry, and the Wright Brothers are to travel"?

The point is neither to criticize Armstrong nor to deny his impact on American music. The point is rather to question the near-hysterical hyperbole that characterizes Jazz in its assessments of its pantheon of players — Armstrong above all, along with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, joined by Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, and Art Blakey (and, what do you know, Wynton Marsalis).

Duke Ellington, for example, is "America's greatest composer," who "couldn't write or record anything other than masterpieces," all the while "creating chords that were never heard before" (at least by Ken Burns). Billie Holiday was "the greatest jazz singer of them all," and even "the single most influential singer America ever produced. (Of course, Bessie Smith is also said to be "the most important female vocalist in the history of jazz," so go figure.) Count Basie "had the greatest rhythm section in jazz history," and "a pulse that was definitive"; indeed, "no band had a greater impact than Count Basie and his band."

The flip side to this feverish pitch is the low-key letdown, the undercutting technique perfected in Jazz to deflate the reputations of those white musicians who even rate a mention. (The documentary also presents baleful historical footage of lynchings, Ku Klux Klan marches, and "whites only" signs to drive the point home.) Benny Goodman, for one, is consistently depicted as something of a commercial fraud whose success came at the expense of others, particularly Fletcher Henderson, a black arranger of great talent without whom, it is implied, Goodman wouldn't have amounted to much.

Even Goodman's early sessions with black musicians — beginning with 1934 recordings that ultimately led to serendipitous collaborations with pianist Teddy Wilson and vibes player Lionel Hampton, among others — are presented in such a way as to suggest petty acts of self-aggrandizement: "Benny Goodman saw no reason why mere custom and prejudice should keep him from improving his band," the narrator intones, slipping yet another compliment into the leader's back. After what Goodman suffers in Jazz, it is a smarmy thing that his picture is used to sell the documentary's boxed CD collection.

Every Jazz viewer will have his own list of omissions and gloss-overs. Mine begins with Oscar Peterson, Gene Krupa, and Mel Powell. Other regrettable gaps include the musically daring Boswell sisters, especially considering the influence of Connee Boswell on Ella Fitzgerald, for instance. And, speaking of Ella Fitzgerald, why is there hardly any mention of "the First Lady of Song" following her debut as a teenager singing novelty tunes? Indeed, there are few singers featured in Jazz aside from Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Bessie Smith — no jazz-age Bing Crosby, no Mel Torme, and no band vocalists.

Which brings us to what may be the most telling omission of Jazz: its complete disregard of American popular song. To be sure, instrumentals were at the heart of jazz, from Count Basie's One O'clock Jump to Benny Goodman's Sing Sing Sing to Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia. But so were the songs by the likes of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, and others. The standards of the jazz songbook composed by these men — who were, pace Ken Bums, mainly white and often Jewish — are too numerous to list, but jazz lovers would be bereft without Louis Armstrong's rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust, Sarah Vaughan's version of Vernon Duke's Autumn in New York, Tommy Dorsey's version of Irving Berlin's Blue Skies (vocal by Frank Sinatra), Coleman Hawkins's version of John Green's Body and Soul, and John Coltrane on Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things ("a cloying little waltz," says Jazz), to name just a few.

Aside from Duke Ellington, the only composer I remember hearing about in Jazz is George Gershwin, peremptorily dismissed as having "spent countless hours listening to black piano players in Harlem." Of course, as Albert Murray would have it, jazz performers produced their own material. "Blues musicians," he explained in Stomping the Blues, "proceed as if the Broadway musical were in fact a major source of crude but fascinating folk materials."

Ken Burns seems receptive to this rather outre point of view. Jazz explains how it was that Louis Armstrong managed to transform "the most superficial love songs into great art," and how poor Billie Holiday had to do the same, turning "routinely mediocre music into great art." ("Art" is a common word in Jazz.) Robin and Rainger's Easy Living — a favorite Holiday recording — springs to mind as an example of the tripe the poor woman had to sing. No wonder she took to drugs. And while we're on the subject of root causes, consider poor Bix Beiderbecke, the lyrical and legendary cornetist who came to a tragic end at twenty-eight, a victim, as one Jazz theorist would have it, of artistic segregation: if Bix had only been permitted to play with black musicians — who were, we are told, "as good and in some cases better than he was" — he might not have died so young.

Over Burns' preface to the book version of Jazz there stands a quotation from Duke Ellington, who said "the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." We can indulge a great musician, but it is tough to take this kind of faux-intellectual stuff from Burns and the rest of his Jazz band. In the end, these nineteen hours of film are about too many angry axes and too many senseless words. Fortunately, what endures is the music, so much of which remains available, beckoning anyone — of any color — who has an open ear.”

— Diana West

Continued in Part 4

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 3

© -  Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Among the many important subjects Ken Burns’ Jazz does not explore is this:If jazz bespeaks the black experience, and only blacks can play it, why does it have, and has had since its beginning, such appeal to people of all races and nationalities? What is there in this music that would electrify a white boy in Canada, namely me? I cannot count how many letters I receive in which the writer says something to the effect,  "The first time I heard jazz I was . . . ."

That first exposure usually lingers vividly in memory. Why were six or seven thousand white people in an arena with me when I first saw Ellington? They weren't responding to this music because they were full of rage or regret over slavery and at last had found a voice to express these emotions. Jazz became a world music, and quite quickly. I am friends with two French writers who specialize in jazz, Paul Benkimoun and Alain Gerber. Paul in fact is a physician who is the medical correspondent for Le Monde. Each of them, particularly Alain, has written me letters explaining the passion he had for jazz from the moment of first exposure.

Musicians from behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain will often tell how they were instantly enthralled by the Voice of America jazz broadcasts of the late Willis Conover — someone else, incidentally, who isn't even mentioned in the series, though he did more than any man in the music's history to spread it around the world, and he — and this music — did more to bring down the Iron Curtain than all the politicians and generals and armies put together.

Why has a similar experience of instantly musical love not occurred in people suddenly exposed to Indian ragas, Japanese koto music, or Chinese opera, which remains as opaque to Westerners as the Chinese language itself? What is there in Chinese opera that we just don't get — and in jazz that we do? What gave it this enormous and often instantaneous appeal? This is an awesome question. It isn't even addressed in Jazz, much less answered..

Jazz, in the end, gives me what it gave Jon Faddis: the blues of sadness — sadness for a lost opportunity. This series could have been: the finest instructional and introductory tool the music has ever known, something I could recommend to anyone. It is appallingly distorted, driven by the payback agenda of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.”

• Gene Lees, Jazz author, critic and publisher

As we noted when the first and second series of criticisms [I use the term here to denote an analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work and not its negative connotation] about Ken Burns PBS TV series Jazz posted to the blog, if you want to stir up a controversy among Jazz fans, do a retrospective on the music and you will be certain to hear from someone about who and what you left out of it.

On the other hand, the tendentious, prepossessed and misrepresented supposed documentary on the subject of Jazz produced by Ken Burns deserves to be skewered for both what is was and what it wasn’t.  

If you doubt the “wisdom” in this assertion read the following correspondence by Dick Sudhalter that was addressed to Gene Lees at the Jazzletter. May 2001

By way of background, trumpeter Richard M. Sudhalter had two careers, one as a musician, the other as a journalist. He co-author a biography of Bix Beiderbecke with Philip Evans and the author of Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945. The latter book documents the contributions of white musicians to jazz. He wrote this rejoinder especially for publication in the Jazzletter.

By Richard M. Sudhalter

“While watching one of the early episodes of the Ken Burns Jazz series, I was surprised to find myself thinking not about Louis Armstrong or any other musician present or past, but about Leni Riefenstahl. No, she insisted in talking about Triumph of the Will and Olympische Spiele, her films weren't Nazi agitprop. They were above politics, beyond ideology; done solely in the interest of Kunst, high art.

It was disingenuous balderdash back in Third Reich days, and balderdash it remains today. Similarly, Mr. Burns keeps telling us he's set out to tell the story of jazz as the great American experience; what he's done instead, I fear, is loose a vast political tract, a multimillion-dollar example of special pleading race for a theory of the centrality of race in twentieth century American culture — all in the guise of a series putatively about music.

That saddens me: not so much that he and his collaborators have created this artifact as the prospect of viewers sitting through it without a thought about the audacious, even insulting, deception that's been worked on them.

Jon Faddis got it right in decrying presentation of a body of disputable opinion as fact. To be sure, Albert Murray's theories about the role of the black experience have a certain strength and inner logic, and are worth discussion; but they are far from revealed truth. Other interpretations, no less responsible, will contest and contradict his at every turn.

Viewers of Jazz aren't permitted to hear those interpretations. Burns, and with him Murray, Marsalis, Crouch, Early, and the stunningly underqualified Margo Jefferson, are relentless in peddling their unidimensional cultural view. It's a view that activates, nurtures, and plays on the racial guilt still endemic in large numbers of white Americans. Hardly a moment goes by when some reminder of the past isn't replayed and reiterated on the screen and in the voice-overs, as if making certain no viewer tunes out or is allowed to forget.

With a boyish candor meant to be disarming, Burns has told interviewers that he regards the history of jazz as a metaphor for the story of America's civil rights. It's a clever gambit: no one of good heart and social conscience will dare publicly challenge him, for fear of being branded a racial atavism. It seems to me that Burns has it exactly backwards: rather than mirror the turbulent struggle of black Americans in a predominantly white society, jazz came about, came of age and flourished, in spite of it. The music, in other words, established its own democracy, an extraordinary freemasonry thriving in the face of society's worst depredations. It guaranteed a warm welcome and instant understanding for everyone, regardless of who he was, if he could play. [Emphasis mine].

Even the phrase "our language," title of one of the episodes, sends a message that is at best ambiguous, at worst exclusionist. Does the "our" identify something solely, defensively black? Or does it refer to something understood and embraced by all who were "inside" regardless of race? I'd like to think it was the latter but fear it is the former.

Gradually, carefully, the series compounds and reinforces its message. Having sat through the entire nineteen hours, a neophyte viewer can be forgiven for thinking the entire century of jazz yielded little more than a handful of titanic figures — "geniuses," in the script's inflated language — who excelled against a field of mediocrities, pretenders, and brigands, most of them white. It's also worth noting that each time a white musician receives any credit, it is as a dropout (Beiderbecke), a popularizer (Goodman), or amanuensis to a black creator (Gil Evans to Miles). That a substantial number of white musicians also qualify as genuine innovators and trailblazers (Norvo, Teagarden, Lang, Gifford, for starters) remains unspoken and, ultimately, inadmissible. We're watching a masterful exercise in synecdoche, peddling the part as the whole.

A small personal digression here. Ken Burns interviewed me for some ninety minutes, mostly about Bix, but also about the white New York-based jazzmen of the late 1920s. With care and, I hoped, clarity, I explained how Beiderbecke brought into jazz a new emotional complexity, a layering hitherto absent from the majestic operatic conceptions of Bechet and Armstrong. Where their utterances proceeded along a vaulting emotional arc, his looked inward, using restraint and even indirection in something of the European manner, freely mixing what might otherwise have been considered mutually contradictory elements. The white New Yorkers, I went on to say, were the universally acknowledged modernists of their time, experimenting imaginatively with form, harmony, and melodic organization.

These were innovations of far-reaching import, facilitating myriad developments now accepted as integral to jazz. Above all, they fostered new awareness in other musicians, just as Louis had done with the idea of swing. Jazz before Bix lacked a certain kind of emotional texture; jazz after him was seldom without it. Nor was that all, I said: free use of substitutions, construction of melodies based on chordal extensions, use of shifting tonal centers, experimentation with forms breaking the tyranny of two, four, and eight-bar patterns — all these traced their origins to a readily identifiable circle of early New York-based musicians who happen to have been white.

Obviously, such views comported ill with the overall "message" of Jazz. Therefore all that survived of our ninety -minute conversation was a pair of supremely innocuous sound bites. Instead, we were treated to Margo Jefferson blithely taking the cheapest of all shots at "Paul White-MAN" and expressing the truly lunatic notion that Bix (who by 1930 was distancing himself from the cornet and hot jazz in general in a quest for broader musical horizons) would somehow have been a more fully realized musician if he'd worked in black bands.

I mention this only to illustrate the degree of manipulation and outright distortion that has allowed Burns and his advisers to put across their socio-political message. In a distant sense it echoes the drumfire of social-justice propaganda that informed (or blemished, depending on how it's read) so much of the earliest critical writing about jazz; back in those prewar days the social-justice propaganda of the New Masses regularly trumped any merely musical consideration. It's all there, self-evident, in the writings of Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, and any number of others, including the hallowed John Hammond.

It's been heartening, at least momentarily, to read Internet parodies of the Burns series, and easy to sympathize with protests at the cavalier neglect of jazz developments since the 1960s. I'll happily add my favorites to the roll-call of key musicians scanted and slighted, in particular the cadre of often extraordinary players who surrounded Eddie Condon. To a man, they've been swept from the picture, like Stalinist-era apparatchiks airbrushed out of a Politburo portrait into un-personhood after falling from party favor.

And, too, what of the songs, the great standards that provided the raw materials for dozens of nonpareil flights of jazz fancy? We hear Louis playing Stardust on the soundtrack, for example, but never the name of Hoagy Carmichael. Are we really to understand that Billie Holiday's chief claim to immortality resides in the blatantly political Strange Fruit! Albert Murray's pet conflation notwithstanding, it wasn't all the blues: whether emanating from the Brill Building or from the Broadway stage, the pop songs were essential and indispensable. They're hardly acknowledged.

I can't help wondering what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, men of dignity and no little humility, would have made of so many distortions and fatuous sanctifications made in their names.

I'd like to think that increasing numbers of jazzfolk, players and chroniclers alike, are aware of, and exercised over, the mischief that's been worked here. I'd like to bury the Panglossian notion that all the media hype and saturation publicity will somehow have a beneficial trickle-down effect on those of us who have spent our lives trying to prise a living out of playing jazz. But I know better: the listening and recreational habits of the public aren't about to change. However momentarily consoling to think of an Armstrong or Ellington CD sharing shelf space with Madonna and Metallica in some twenty-something's luxury Manhattan duplex, it's ultimately cold comfort.

It's been a long uphill struggle bringing the rich and varied traditions, and the joys, of a century of hot music to the attention of a generally unheeding public. I regret that the wildly disproportionate success of Burns's Jazz is only going to make the grade that much steeper. Leni Riefenstahl has lived long enough to witness her own disgrace; I doubt we have world enough and time to wait for Burns and his accomplices to suffer a comparable, richly deserved, fate.”

— Richard M. Sudhalter

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 2B

© -  Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Ken Burns Jazz has an unwholesome preoccupation with heroin addiction. One odious sequence shows a young man sticking a needle into his arm. An elder musician said, "It makes us look like a bunch of drunks and dopers." It shows nothing of the gracious (and sometimes wealthy) lives lived by Benny Carter, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, and many more, nor does it show the remarkably long list of addicts who, like Mulligan, kicked the habit. In this it is deeply, grimly, morbidly misleading.” 

- Gene Lees, Jazz author, essayist and publisher

“Wynton Marsalis shares Burns's long-standing propensity for overstatement in the service of high ideals. Burns lets Marsalis and others get away with so much in Jazz — presenting the character and motivations of long-dead musicians, for example, without distinguishing between legend and actual memory — that his methods as a documentarian are open to question, along with his credentials as a social historian.”

- Francis Davis, Jazz author, critic, essayist

We continued our retrospective review of Ken Burns PBS television series on the subject of Jazz with the following pieces by Terry Teachout, Jazz author, critic and former bassist, Francis Davis, a Jazz author who frequently writes for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, Don Heckman the Jazz columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Ken Downey with The Seattle Weekly.

Terry Teachout

“By his own admission, Ken Burns knew little about jazz when he undertook to tell its long, complicated story. Hence it should come as no surprise that Jazz has little of interest to say about the music with which it is nominally concerned. I find it revealing that Mr. Burns rarely allows any piece of music to play more than a few seconds, uninterrupted by the distracting chatter of a talking head (usually Wynton Marsalis).

Instead, he gives us hour upon hour of garrulous anecdotage and gaseous generalizations, many of the latter seemingly intended to suggest that jazz was less a musical phenomenon than a sociological one.

"Jazz" says Mr. Burns, "necessarily becomes a story about race relations and prejudice, about minstrelsy and Jim Crow, lynching and civil rights." That may be what Jazz is but it's not what jazz was. Of course you cannot properly tell the story of jazz without closely examining its cultural context, but to treat the aesthetic achievements of geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as mere opportunities for historical point-making is to distort them beyond recognition. Jazz is neither a war nor a sport — it is an art form, one significant enough to be chronicled in its own right and on its own terms, something that Jazz scarcely even attempts to do.”

Francis Davis

After remarking that he found the series “enjoyable television,” Davis went on to make these observations about Ken Burns Jazz:

A few seconds into the first episode the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis — a senior creative consultant on the series who is onscreen so much that he might as well have been given star billing — informs us that "jazz music objectifies America" and gives us "a painless way of understanding ourselves." His declaration is followed by a montage of the music's major figures over which the actor Keith David, reading copy supplied by Geoffrey C. Ward (who also co-wrote the scripts for Burns's two previous series) is an "improvisational act, making itself up as it goes along, just like the country that gave it birth." The lecture continues throughout the series, delivered by Marsalis and others. Close to the end, Marsalis restates the theme with a little extra spin, as he might with a melody to conclude a performance with his band. Jazz "gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself," he says, talking in the way that presidential candidates are prone to do — as if believing that democracy is a form of existentialism.

Marsalis shares Burns's long-standing propensity for overstatement in the service of high ideals. Burns lets Marsalis and others get away with so much in Jazz — presenting the character and motivations of long-dead musicians, for example, without distinguishing between legend and actual memory — that his methods as a documentarian are open to question, along with his credentials as a social historian.

After some preliminary flag-waving, Burns's new series begins with the hoariest of creation myths: that New Orleans was the single birthplace of jazz, something I doubt anyone besides Burns and his New Orleans-born senior creative adviser believes. It's one with the latest in resurrection myths that Marsalis's arrival on the scene in 1980 saved jazz from death at the hands of self-indulgent avant-gardists and purveyors of jazz-rock fusion (we're even shown snapshots of the baby Wynton)....

Burns has admitted to knowing nothing about jazz going into this project, and he seems to have learned most of what he now knows about the subject from Marsalis. With Crouch and Murray on the board of advisers and serving as commentators, what we're getting is the party line ....

Bill Evans was the most influential pianist of the last forty years, but all we learn about him is that he once played with Miles Davis and was white. You'd think he was significant only as an example of the black trumpeter's enlightened employment policy .. .

Burns is big on sociological context, so the music unfolds against a backdrop of speakeasies and bread lines, dance crazes and world wars, lynchings and civil rights marches. The series certainly looks good, and it sounds good, too, if you ignore Keith David's overenunciated delivery (he sounds like he was bitten by the same bug that got Maya Angelou) and the melodramatic readings by a host of other actors ....

As annoying as Marsalis can be, though, he takes a back seat to the preening Matt Glaser, a violinist who performed on the sound tracks of The Civil War and Baseball who turns up every so often to share an insight on, say, Armstrong's relationship with the space-time continuum. Glaser sounds like one of those guys you overhear trying to impress their dates in jazz clubs, only it's us he's trying to score with ....

The larger problems with the series stems from the dubious habits Burns has picked up since The Civil War. For every person we hear speaking from experience, another comes along to tell us things he couldn't possibly know. Talking with certainty about events in the lives of Armstrong and Ellington, Marsalis might as well be a televangelist chatting confidentially about Jesus. Of the semi-mythical early-twentieth century New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, Marsalis says his "innovation was one of personality, so instead of playing all his fast stuff, he would bring you the sound of Buddy Bolden." How could he know? No recording of Bolden survives, and he is said to have played in public for the last time in 1907. [Emphasis mine] As Marsalis speaks, we hear a trumpeter on the soundtrack playing a rollicking blues, with no indication that it's a recent performance by Marsalis. Most viewers will probably assume it's Bolden, and will surely accept what Marsalis says about him.

As in Baseball, Burns shows tendencies toward cockeyed legend, cut-rate sociology, and amateur psychoanalysis.”

Don Heckman

[Don Heckman, in the Los Angeles Times, noted how little attention was given to jazz on the West Coast. He wrote:]

"From the early appearances by Jelly Roll Morton in the twenties, through the glory days of Central Avenue, into the cool sounds of West Coast jazz in the fifties, through the edgy sixties and into the diverse blends of funk, blues, avant-garde and revisited mainstream ... Southern California has been a primal, if underappreciated, producer of world-class jazz."

Heckman quotes John Clayton: "And it fails to acknowledge the special relationships — as co-workers and friends — that have historically existed between most jazz musicians, black and white, in Los Angeles."

Ken Downey

“... the way Burns & Co. cram the last forty years of the music's hundred-year history into the last tenth of the series' running time, and the way Marsalis and his cronies dominate much of that, is as comic as it is arrogant."

[If the series raised jazz record sales through the ceiling, he says], that "is good news for the media conglomerates who hold the copyrights on past masterpieces. Most have shut down their jazz divisions; why spend money recording the living when you can do so nicely fattening on the dead?"

[Downey wasn't even enthralled by it as movie-making. He wrote:]

“As one who can claim not to have missed one second of [its] 1,067 minutes ... I am here to tell you that Jazz is one hundred percent twenty-four karat Burnsiana, in every respect a meticulous stylistic copy of his earlier PBS blockbusters, The Civil War and Baseball.

And that's exactly what's wrong with it. Never have subject matter and style been so ill-matched in a non-fiction film: Imagine Roger and Me's Michael Moore documenting daily life in a nunnery — that far off key. Jazz, the music, is exuberant, anarchic, mercurial; Jazz the film is solemn, plodding, relentless. ...

Even in The Civil War, Burns' unremitting solemnity and death-march pacing troubled some viewers (well me, anyway) but at least the approach suited the seriousness of the subject. Apparently due to the enormous commercial appeal and critical success of that film, Burns has approached every subject since in the same spirit and with the same set of technical tools until both have hardened into invariable formula. Once again we have the slow pans across grainy historic photos intercut with interpretive color by contemporary experts, both bathed in the reverential musings of an omniscient narrator .. . and evocative, ever-changing background noise.”

To be continued….