Jazz (documentary)

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Jazz: A Film By Ken Burns is a documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns.

Jazz is the last in a trilogy by Burns, following The Civil War and Baseball. It was broadcast on PBS in 2001, and was released on DVD later that year by the same company.

The film concerns the history of jazz music in the USA, from its origins at the turn of the twentieth century through to the present day. It is narrated by Keith David, and features interviews with present-day musicians and critics such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (also the artistic director and co-producer of Jazz) and noted critic Gary Giddins. Jazz is the longest jazz documentary yet produced, and it is rich in musical examples and classic, rare and unseen footage.

Visually, Jazz is very much in the same style as Ken Burns' previous works: panning and zooming shots of photographs are mixed with period movie sequences, accompanied by music of, and commentary on, the period being examined. Between these sequences, present-day jazz figures provide anecdotes and explain the defining features of the major musicians' styles.

The documentary focuses on a number of major musicians: Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn"^[1], among them Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

A number of companion CDs were released simultaneously.

1 Episodes
2 Response and criticism
- 2.1 Positive reviews
- 2.2 Negative reviews
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Episodes

Each two-hour episode of the ten episodes of Jazz covers a different era:

Gumbo - Beginnings	to 1917
The Gift	1917-1924
Our Language	1924-1928
The True Welcome	1929-1935
Swing - Pure Pleasure	1935-1937
Swing - The Velocity of Celebration	1937-1939
Dedicated to Chaos	1940-1945
Risk	1945-1956
The Adventure	1956-1961
A Masterpiece by Midnight	1961-2001

[edit] Response and criticism

Jazz was nominated for several awards, including multiple Emmy Awards.

[edit] Positive reviews

Among the positive critics, Charles Paul Freund writes that Jazz "is filled with rewards, many of them proffered unintentionally ... Burns' documentary gifts are not visionary, analytical, nor even properly historical. Rather, he is a talented biographer, and his films are most effective when he is able to present an overarching narrative in terms of the biographical detail of that narrative's participants."^[2] Jason Van Bergen declares, "The nearly 19 hours of documentary coverage contained in the "Jazz" series unravels like a fine wine" and due to the series' attention to detail, "a complete discussion of every episode in Ken Burns' Jazz would be better suited for a Master's Thesis" than to his brief review. Van Bergen sums up, writing, "Burns' encyclopedic rendering of the growth of jazz cannot be questioned. Followers of the music will need this set on their shelves; but perhaps slightly more surprisingly, serious students of American history may also require the set to supplement their versions of the past century."^[3]

[edit] Negative reviews

With a negative opinion, Jeffrey St. Clair writes, "Ken Burns' interminable documentary, Jazz, starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there ... Burns is a classicist, who is offended by the rawer sounds of the blues, its political dimension and inescapable class dynamic. Instead, Burns fixates on a particular kind of jazz music that appeals to his PBS sensibility: the swing era. It's a genre of jazz that enables Burns to throw around phrases such 'Ellington is our Mozart.' He sees jazz as art form in the most culturally elitist sense, as being a museum piece, beautiful but dead, to be savored like a stroll through a gallery of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."^[4]

The main criticism of Jazz has been that while it covers thoroughly the origins and development of New Orleans jazz, swing music, bebop and hard bop, it ultimately spends very little time on more modern movements such as free jazz, avant-garde jazz or jazz fusion: only one episode is devoted to the development of jazz in the last 40 years. Gary Giddins' own views on modern jazz were not much mentioned (he has often championed avant garde players like Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor and David S. Ware). Hundreds of acclaimed, influential and successful artists such as Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, David Murray, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, and many others received little attention.

Some otherwise positive reviews argue that, due to this fast-forwarding through several decades of the music's development, Jazz offered a warped or inaccurate picture of jazz since 1960. For example, critic David Adler writes that the first nine episodes, "Burns has done a respectable job of introducing pre-1960 jazz history to a wide audience. In Episode Ten, however, he gives viewers a disastrously skewed portrait of the creative lineage that has produced much of today's best jazz." [5]

Another criticism is the over-emphasis on jazz as an American music. While jazz was created in in the United States, it has since become an international music, and important non-American musicians (such as guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli) were not covered in any detail.

While the above noted complaints are largely matters of opionion, Stu Vandermark's detailed review of Jazz contends that there were substantial factual errors in the documentary. Notably, Vandermark notes that Jazz repeats the debunked myth that jazz music was created in New Orleans; on the contrary, writes Vandermark, "no one really knows where jazz was born ... It is likely that the music evolved spontaneously in different cities around the U.S. wherever there were a few thousand black people making lives for themselves." ^[6]