Miles Davis At Columbia, Records That Is ....

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

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Benny Goodman, Buck Clayton, Eddie Condon, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman - at a point in time in Jazz’s halcyon days, it seemed that every major Jazz artist issued records on the Columbia label.

Of course Verve, Capitol, RCA and many other recording labels that were exclusively devoted to Jazz such as Blue Note, Prestige and Pacific Jazz had their stable of notable Jazz artists, but Columbia seemed to have more of the trendsetter and signature Jazz performers.

Miles Davis was the musician whose appearance on Columbia in the mid-1950’s surprised me the most.

In my nascent awareness of what was going on with the Jazz recordings of that era, Miles seemed ensconced at Prestige, one of the Jazz boutique labels. Relaxin’ Steamin’, Cookin’, Workin’ and one LP simply entitled Miles just appeared one after another on Bob Weinstock’s Prestige label that I thought that Miles was a permanent fixture there.

But with Miles being a savvy businessman, there was a lot going on behind the scene in terms of his move to Columbia as Michael Cuscuna explains in his Introduction to The Complete Miles Davis and John Coltrane on Columbia, 1955-1961, six CD boxed set [65833].  These were among his first Columbia recordings and would go on to become the bedrock upon which Miles built his claim to international stardom.

“MILES DAVIS WAS A CANNY BUSINESSMAN AS WELL AS A GREAT ARTIST.

The difference in his approach to recording sessions for Prestige and Columbia underlines that point. The first Columbia session was made on October 26, 1955, while he was still under contract to Prestige and it marks the inaugural recording of the great quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Despite the session's artistic success, it only yielded four quintet tunes, two of which he would remake in 1958. Listening to the alternate takes on this session and throughout this set, it is evident that Miles is working hard to achieve truly great and beautiful performances.

At Prestige, he was generating whole albums in a single or double session, often with personnel that was assembled only for the date. And once he had this quintet in place and a Columbia contract in hand, he was able to record thirty-one tunes, five albums worth, during three recording days over the next year, to complete his Prestige obligations.

His entire studio output at Columbia, from his first session until the spring of 1959, consisted of two albums with Gil Evans and the equivalent of four albums with his small group. And the tunes he recorded for Columbia were most often the ones that he played live. Clearly, Miles understood the power of a major label and what he had to do to make it work for him.

In lesser hands, this careful, conscious approach to recording could create music stiffer than Guy Lombardo. But in the hands of any artist of this caliber who understood the weight of a note and impact of space, the results are astonishing.

The first three sessions on this set (October 26, 1955, June 5 and September 10, 1956) are by the original quintet and parallel the group's sessions for Prestige (November 16, 1955, May 11 and October 26, 1956). Of the ten tunes for Columbia, six made up the first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight, while two were issued on anthologies of the time and the remaining two did not appear until the Seventies.

In 1957, the Quintet disintegrated through a series of departures and firings. But Miles was concentrating on recording Miles Ahead with Gil Evans and made no small group recordings during this year of flux. He reformed the original quintet in December, adding Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone.

The next February and March, he recorded Milestones with this sextet. Available only in mono or electronically rechanneled stereo for four decades, it makes its first appearance in stereo (along with an unissued "Little Melonae" and three magnificent alternate takes| in this box set.

The fact that Red Garland showed up so late to the March session and that he appeared only on the third and last tune certainly contributed to his dismissal later that month. Philly Joe quit in May. Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb were their replacements and the sound of the band began to change.

The new edition of the Sextet went in the studio in May and recorded four tunes, three of which were used to fill out Jazz Track, an album with Miles' score to the French film L'Ascenseur pour L'Echafaud.

Live gigs at the Newport Jazz Festival and a Columbia Records Jazz Party at the Plaza Hotel were taped, but shelved until 1964 and 1973 respectively. (To preserve the flow and development of the studio material by the Davis band with Coltrane, these live sessions appear out of chronological sequence at the end of this set.) Between those gigs, Miles would record Porgy And Bess with Gil Evans.

By the end of that year, Bill Evans had left to form his own trio. Wynton Kelly would replace him. However, Evans would return in March and April, 1959 as pianist (on four tunes), composer ("Blue In Green") and liner note writer for the ground-breaking modal masterpiece Kind Of Blue.

John Coltrane, who'd recently left Prestige to sign with Atlantic Records, left the band in May to start developing his own group. But he was drafted back in several times before his final stint, a European tour in March and April, 1960. His last professional appearance with Miles was the trumpeter's first small-group studio recording since Kind Of Blue. Trane played on two pieces during those March 1961 sessions that produced Someday My Prince Will Come.

This set charts the development of two of the most influential and ever-evolving artists in American music. Their growth from take to take, session to session and year to year is an astonishing thing to behold. Despite, or perhaps because of, their drastically different approaches to improvisation, they made one of the more magnificent teams in jazz.”

• MICHAEL CUSCUNA

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 1D

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

The following posting is Part 1D of the JazzProfiles retrospective review of the Ken Burns PBS television series Jazz which will run consecutively as Parts 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D. I have divided Part 1 into four segments to make it more manageable for me to develop into postings and to make it easier for the reader to absorb the writer’s arguments about the series. Parts 2 and 3 will follow shortly.

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 ecries 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.

To Be Continued...

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 1C

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

The following posting is Part 1C of the JazzProfiles retrospective review of the Ken Burns PBS television series Jazz which will run consecutively as Parts 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D. I have divided Part 1 into four segments to make it more manageable for me to develop into postings and to make it easier for the reader to absorb the writers' arguments about the series.

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

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 1B

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

Here’s is the continuation of Part 1 of the JazzProfiles retrospective review of the Ken Burns PBS television series Jazz which will run consecutively as Parts 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D. I have broken down Part 1 into four segments to make it more manageable for me to develop into postings and to make it easier for the reader to absorb the writer’s arguments about the series.

There will also be a Part 2 and a Part 3 to Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review and these will also be divided into segments and run consecutively on the blog]

Two of the most interesting pieces about the Ken Burns series on Jazz were written for the Columbus Dispatch by S.R.B. Iyer, of whom you may never have never heard. Bala Iyer was born in Coimbatore, India. He studied economics in Delhi, moved to the U.S. in 1981 to work on a doctorate, and studied English literature at Purdue and Ohio State universities. He wrote two pieces about Jazz, the first an interview, the second a review.

In order to avoid confusion about who is being heard in this and in other pieces I will quote, I have placed in bold face and italics, the byline at both the beginning and the end of the commentary.

By S.R.B. Iyer

One

Ken Burns, the television documentarian, was asked recently to reflect on American indifference to the past.

He was in Walpole, New Hampshire.

"It comes," he said over the telephone, "from the relative youth of the country. I live here in a village, one of the oldest on this continent. And yet there were Indians here 225 years ago, killing off the first white people. So, you know, it's a very, very young country. The response to the Civil War (series) was flabbergasting, not just for me, but for the rest of the country, because we suddenly realized we had a past and wanted to have one ...."

His new documentary series, Jazz, is the final installment of his "trilogy on American life." Burns says he began his Civil War television series without any idea that he was embarking on such a long project. But the pattern of American history made his trilogy inevitable. The Civil War, he says, quoting Shelby Foote, "defined us." Baseball (his television series and the game) "helps us understand what we had become." Jazz (the music, and possibly his series as well) is "a very accurate witness of the twentieth century" and "suggests some sense of what we might become." This is because "the model of jazz is so democratic, is so without barriers, so utterly American."

Burns has been listening seriously to jazz for about six years. And in all his pronouncements on the subject, one hears the fervor of a recent convert. He acknowledges, when pressed, the irony that he has discovered jazz during what is widely agreed to be one of its most fallow periods. However, he feels that this is a superficial view.

"Jazz isn't as popular as it used to be, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a vital art form. Witness Citizen Kane, the greatest film of all time: a huge box-office disappointment when it first came out. Van Gogh was essentially a suicide. Today his paintings sell for more than anyone else's on earth."

Some Americans feel that jazz is old-fashioned, he says. Others think "it has an esoteric dimension." They think that to understand it, they "need advanced degrees." This "is an unfortunate consequence of a jazz community that is consistently fighting and bickering with itself." Burns has made Jazz to dispel all these misconceptions. He is confident "that after 25 years of experience, that the sorts of things that I have done have sort of hit the Zeitgeist of my country quite accurately at times."

He says that the good news about jazz has spread all over the world. Its appeal is universal. He visited the president at the White House not long ago. "We stayed up all night listening to jazz. He told me about meeting a saxophone player in Russia. The president is a huge jazz aficionado. He said that when this guy was on, "it was as good as anything I have heard."

One gets the sense that Burns is exasperated by "the jazz community" even as he is preparing to carry the gospel of jazz to millions of American television viewers. He complains that his documentary has already been criticized by members of this "contentious" tribe for omissions, misplaced emphases, etc.

When this subject is raised, he becomes declamatory, even ecstatic.

"My story," he says, "is much larger. I'm a very controlling and in-control film maker. Nobody is going to arrest my agenda. And my agenda is to tell a compelling national narrative to my countrymen, in the most compelling way I can, filled with the undertow of contradiction and irony that attends any manifestation in this universe and to eschew the kind of simplistic philosophical, dialectical, or political solutions that criticism often applies to things. I'd rather deal with a complex relationship to minstrelsy, a complex relationship to race in the early white practitioners of jazz, to drugs, to war and things like that. And I think the film has done it and done it magnificently."

Jazz also "parses the question of race in America." Burns says that "the greatest poetic justice that I have ever come across is the fact that the only art form Americans have created was born out of the community that has experienced a lack of freedom in a supposedly free land."

Asked how the series ends, Bums says, "We quite consciously turned the spigot of our narrative off about '75." He made this decision not out of fear — "I have been fearless about the other aspects in all the episodes" — but because he "is in the business of history" and prefers to "deal with the past."

He is happy to leave the present to "reviewers, critics, journalists."”

Two

“To enjoy (this) documentary series, it is helpful, if not essential, to know as little as possible about jazz. If one knows very little — absolute ignorance is ideal — about the history of this country in the twentieth century, one might be Burns's perfect audience.

Burns's basic assumption is breath takingly simple-minded: jazz reflects, at every stage of its evolution, the social, cultural, and political circumstances of the period. It has been a running commentary on American life. We are told, for instance, that Louis Armstrong's monumental West End Blues, recorded in 1928, was "a reflection of the country in the moments before the Great Depression." How a piece of music does this is not made clear. One might wonder then whether Charlie Parker's Cool Blues is a vote for or against Keynesian economics.

Three elements in Jazz compete for the viewer's attention: the script, the music, and the pictures on the screen. The pictures — still photographs, documentary footage, clips of musicians — are superb. The music, some curious choices notwithstanding, is often as good. But both pictures and music are overwhelmed by the sheer badness of the script.

The script is everything good jazz isn't: sentimental, solemn, melodramatic, and deficient in both humor and subtlety. It is oppressively defensive. It is sanctimonious and self-important. Crammed with superlatives, it often seems less history than advertisement.

Structurally, Jazz is both repetitious and unimaginative. A musician, say Sidney Bechet, is introduced. His social-political-historical context is established with period photographs, documentary footage, and the testimony of experts and contemporaries. Sometimes the order is reversed. Wynton Marsalis then reassures us of this person's worthiness. The process isn't complete without this intrusion by Marsalis.

In Sidney Bechet's case, could we not have heard instead from the soprano saxophonist Bob Wilber? He knew Bechet; he was a student of Bechet's in the late '40s; he played with Bechet. He is alive; and he speaks English.

Burns seems to have learnt about jazz from Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, and Wynton Marsalis. The ideological tilt of the film is recognizably theirs. Those who follow jazz might wonder at the experts Burns has chosen. Fortunately Gary Giddins is among them. He is vivid, funny and memorable; and especially eloquent on Armstrong and Parker.

Gerald Early, who is heard from at great length, is at the other end on the spectrum of eloquence. Early is Burns's expert on race. His commitment to opaque generalization is total: "Jazz seemed so much to capture the absurdity of the modern world." "Jazz is a kind of lyricism about the great American promise and our inability to live up to it in some ways." Etc. He opines that Miles Davis "had decided he was going to be the ultimate Walt Whitman," but the description of Davis's Whitmanesque trumpet style is beyond him. "It was a kind of piercing sort of sound," he offers. "It was piercing and mellow at the same time."

The story of jazz, in Ken Burns's narrative, is essentially the story of four or five representative figures. Louis Armstrong -— the Shakespeare, Bach and Dante of American music (Gary Giddins) — is unknowable. Duke Ellington, "the greatest American composer," is presented as something of an exemplary figure. Charlie Parker is the jazz martyr, undone by drugs, drinks, and "inner demons." Benny Goodman, a lesser musician, is an expert popularizer, the white face of jazz. Miles Davis epitomizes black militancy.

In addition to these suns, a number of satellites arc considered in passing. They are chosen to illustrate some socio-cultural point.

The naive jazz lover, expecting to see his heroes celebrated, will get some nasty shocks. The treatment of Benny Carter, for instance. Carter was, with the exception of Johnny Hodges, the finest alto saxophonist before Charlie Parker and is, perhaps, the most versatile musician to grace jazz. Besides the alto saxophone, he has been recorded playing the clarinet, piano, trombone, the tenor and soprano saxophones, and he is a brilliant trumpeter. Carter was a fine bandleader and one of the most influential composers and arrangers in the history of jazz. Unfortunately, his importance is merely musical, and he is therefore not usable by Burns. He doesn't rate even a moment's consideration.

The parochialism of Jazz is another surprise. "Utterly American," a "uniquely American music." Jazz is undoubtedly all of that. But, almost from the beginning, it has had a passionate following outside the United States. The importance to jazz of the French writers Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay — as critics, record producers, magazine editors, and discographers — cannot be emphasized too strongly. There arc large jazz festivals every year in France, Wales, England, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, and other countries. The working American jazz musician understands the importance of all this, even if Burns and Co. don't.

When Louis Armstrong died, in 1971, Philip Larkin wrote that he had been "something inexhaustible and unchanging like the sun," that he was "an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike." The universality of jazz is a miraculous achievement. It should be one of the themes of a documentary like Burns's. It isn't. And perhaps, understandably. For it would have meant examining those qualities of jazz — musical and emotional — that resist simple sociological interpretation.

Philip Larkin wrote in his poem For Sidney Bechet: "On me your voice falls as they say love should / Like an enormous yes."

While suffering through the epic dreariness of Ken Burns's story, I found myself, all too often, entertaining feelings of an altogether different sort.”

— S.R.B. Iyer