Find album credit information for Ken Burns Jazz - Sidney Bechet on AllMusic.
Ken Burn’s interminable documentary Jazz starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there. Burns heralds jazz as the great American contribution to world music and sets it up as a kind of roadmap to racial relations across the 20th century. But surely that distinction belongs to the blues, the music born on the plantations of the Mississippi delta. Indeed, though Burns underplays this, jazz sprang from the blues. But so did R&B, rock-and-roll, funk and hip hop.
But 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.
But 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.
His film unspools for 19 hours over seven episodes: beginning in the brothels of New Orleans and ending with the career of saxophonist Dexter Gordon. But in the end it didn’t cover all that much ground. The film fixates on three figures: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the young Miles Davis. There are sidetrips and footnotes to account for Sidney Bechet, Billie Holliday, Bix Beiderbecke, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane.
But the arc of his narrative is the rise and fall of jazz. For Burns, jazz reached its apogee with Armstrong and Ellington and its denouement with Davis’ 1959 recording, Kind of Blue. For Burns and company it’s been all downhill since then: he sees the avant guarde recordings of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor and the growth of the fusion movement as a form artistic degeneracy. When asked to name his top ten jazz songs, Burns didn’t include a single piece after 1958. His film packs in everything that’s been produced since Kind of Blue (40 years worth of music) into a single griping episode. Even Kind of Blue-the most explicated jazz session in history-gets shoddy treatment from Burns in the film, who elides any mention of pianist Bill Evans, the man who gave the record its revolutionary modal sound.
This is typical of the Burns method. His films all construct a pantheon of heroes and anti-heroes, little manufactured dramas of good and evil. Armstrong and Ellington are gods to be worshipped (despite their fllirtations with Hollywood glitz), but Davis and Coltrane (both at root blues musicians to our ears) are fallen idols–Coltrane into the exquisite abstractions of Giant Steps and Love Supreme and Miles into the funk and fusion of Bitches Brew, On the Corner and his amazing A Tribute to Jack Johnson. Coleman, the sonic architect of the Free Jazz movement, is anathema.
It’s easy to see why. Burns boasts that his American trilogy-the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz-is at bottom a history of racial relations. But it’s not a history so much as a fantasy meant for the white suburban audiences who watch his movies. For Burns, it’s a story of a seamless movement toward integration: from slavery to emancipation, segregation to integration, animus to harmony. For every black hero, there is a white counterpart: Frederick Douglas/Lincoln, Jackie Robinson/Branch Rickey, Louis Armstrong/Tommy Dorsey. In other words, a feel-good narrative of white patronage and understanding.
This, in part, explains why Burns recoils from the fact that Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and their descendents have taken jazz not toward soft, white-friendly swing sound but deeper into the urban black experience. When Davis went electric, it was as significant a move as Dylan coming out on with a rock-and-roll band (and not just any band, but the Hawks). In 1966. Dylan was jeered by the folkie elites as a “Judas”; and, despite the fact that Bitches Brew went on to be one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, Davis is still being slammed. Burns includes a quote in his film denouncing Davis’s excursions into fusion as a “denaturing” of jazz.
The Burns style-drilled into viewers over his previous films, the Civil War, Baseball and Frank Lloyd Wright-is irritating and as condescending as any Masterpiece Theatre production of a minor novel by Trollope: episodic, monotonous, edgeless. By now his technique is as predictable as the plot of an episode of “Friends”: the zoom shot on a still photo, followed by a slow pan, a pull back, then a portentous pause-all the while a monotonous narration explains the obvious at length.
The series is narrated by a troika of neo-cons: Wynton Marsalis, the favorite trumpeter of the Lincoln Center patrons; writer Albert Murray, who chastised the militant elements of the civil rights and anti-war movements with his pal Ralph Ellison; and Stanley Crouch, the Ward Connerly of music critics. This trio plays the part that Shelby Foote did for Burns’ previous epic, the Civil War-a sentimental, morbid and revisionist take on what Foote, an unrepentant Southern romanticist, wistfully referred to as the war between the states.
Instead of interviewing contemporary jazz musicians, Burns sought out Marsalis, a trumpeter who is stuck in the past. “When Marsalis was 19 he was a fine jazz trumpeter,” says Pierre Sprey, president of Mapleshade Records, a jazz and blues label. “But he was getting his ass kicked every night in Art Blakey’s band. I don’t think he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He’s a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical music. He has no clue what’s going on now.”
Crouch brings similar baggage to the table. “Crouch started out as a modern jazz drummer”, a veteran of the New York jazz scene tells CounterPunch. “But he wasn’t very good. And finally he was booted from a lot of the avant garde sessions. He’s had a vendetta ever since.”
The excessive emphasis in the series on Louis Armstrong, often featuring very inferior work, no doubt stems from the fact that Gary Giddins, another consultant for the series, wrote a book on Armstrong.
Burns’ parting shot is the story of Dexter Gordon, a tenor saxophonist whose life is more compelling than his playing. Typically Burns transforms Gordon’s life into a morality play, a condensation of his entire film: born in L.A. Gordon mastered to the Parker/bebop method and when it passed him by, he battled depression and heroin addiction, fled to Copenhagen, and finally returned to the US in the late 1970s enjoying a brief renaissance in high priced jazz clubs in New York and DC, starred in Bernard Tavernier’s tribute to bebop ‘Round Midnight and died in 1990.
How different Burns’ film would have been if, instead of Gordon, he had trained his camera on Sonny Rolllins, who, like Coltrane, learned much from Gordon but ultimately surpassed him. Of course, Rolllins is still alive and still making strikingly innovative music. His latest album, This Is What I Do, is one of his best. But this, of course, would have undermined the Burns/Marsalis/Crouch thesis that the avant garde and Afro-centric strains, which began about the same time Gordon left the states, killed jazz.
After enduring Jazz in its entirety, there’s only one conclusion to be reached: Burns doesn’t really like music. In the 19 hours of film, he never lets one song play to completion, anywhere near completion. Yet there is a constant chatter riding on top of the music. It’s annoying and instructive, as if Burns himself were both bored of the entire project and simultaneously hypnotized by the sound of his own words interpreting what he won’t allow us to hear.
This may be the ultimate indictment of Burns’ Jazz: the compulsion to verbalize what is essentially a nonverbal artform. It’s also insulting; he assumes that the music itself, if allowed to be heard and felt, wouldn’t be able, largely on its own volition, to move and educate those who (unlike Burns) are willing open their ears and really listen. In a film supposedly about music, the music itself has been relegated to the background, as a distant soundtrack for trite observations on culture and neo-Spenglerian notions about the arc of American cap-H History. In that sense, Burns and his cohorts don’t even demonstrate faith in the power of the swing-era music they offer up as the apex of jazz.
There are some great documentaries on popular music. Three very different ones come to mind: Bert Stern’s beautiful Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which integrates jazz, swing, avant guard, gospel and rock-n-roll all into one event, Robert Mugge’s Deep Blues, a gorgeously shot and recorded road movie about the blues musicians of the Mississippi Delta, and Jean-Luc Godard’s One+One, which documents the recording of the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil. All are vibrant films that let the music and musicians do the talking. But Ken Burns learned nothing from any of them. Watching his Jazz is equivalent to listening to a coroner speak into a dictaphone as he dissects a corpse.
This essay is excerpted from Serpents in the Garden (CounterPunch/AK Press).
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: [email protected].
(Redirected from Jazz (TV series))
Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns | |
---|---|
Genre | Documentary |
Written by | Geoffrey Ward |
Directed by | Ken Burns |
Narrated by | Keith David |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of episodes | 10 |
Production | |
Producer(s) | Ken Burns, Lynn Novick |
Cinematography | Buddy Squires, Ken Burns |
Editor(s) | Paul Barnes |
Running time | 1140 minutes |
Budget | USD $13 million |
Release | |
Original network | PBS |
Original release | January 8 – 31, 2001[1] |
External links | |
Website |
Jazz is a 2001 television documentaryminiseries, directed by Ken Burns. It was broadcast on PBS in 2001,[2] and was released on DVD and VHS on January 2, 2001 by the same company. Its chronological and thematic episodes provided a history of jazz, emphasizing innovative composers and musicians and American history. Swing musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures.[3] Several episodes discussed the later contributions of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to bebop, and of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane to free and cool jazz. Nine episodes surveyed forty-five years (1917–1961), leaving the final episode to cover forty years (1961–2001). The series was produced by Florentine Films in cooperation with the BBC and in association with WETA-TV, Washington.
- 3Response and criticism
Overview[edit]
The documentary concerned the history of jazz music in the United States, from its origins at the turn of the 20th century to the present day. It was narrated by Keith David and featured interviews with present-day musicians and critics such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (also the artistic director and co-producer of Jazz) and critics Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch. Music critic and African-American historian Gerald Early was a consultant. Broadcaster and producer Phil Schaap was interviewed briefly.
Visually, Jazz was in the same style as Ken Burns' previous works: slowly 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 provided anecdotes and explained the defining features of the major musicians' styles. Duke Ellington's 'I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart' (1938) was a recurring motif at the opening and closing of individual episodes of the series.
The documentary focused 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',[3] 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.
Episodes[edit]
Each two-hour episode of the ten episodes of Jazz covered a different era.[1]
No. | Title | Time period | Themes | Original air date | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 'Gumbo' | To 1917 | Blues, Louisiana Creole music, minstrel shows, New Orleans jazz, Original Dixieland Jass Band, ragtime | January 8, 2001 | |
Personalities: Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, James Reese Europe, Nick LaRocca | |||||
2 | 'The Gift' | 1917–1924 | Chicago jazz, Harlem Renaissance, New Orleans jazz, World War I | January 9, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, James Reese Europe, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, King Oliver, Willie Smith, Paul Whiteman | |||||
3 | 'Our Language' | 1924–1928 | Cotton Club, Harlem Renaissance, Savoy Ballroom | January 10, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Artie Shaw, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters | |||||
4 | 'The True Welcome' | 1929–1935 | Great Depression, Lindy hop, swing music | January 15, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, John Hammond, Fletcher Henderson, Billy Rose, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Chick Webb | |||||
5 | 'Swing: Pure Pleasure' | 1935–1937 | Discrimination in public accommodations, Great Depression, Savoy Ballroom, swing music | January 17, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Chick Webb, Teddy Wilson | |||||
6 | 'Swing: The Velocity of Celebration' | 1937–1939 | Great Depression, Kansas City jazz, swing music | January 22, 2001 | |
Personalities: Count Basie, Harry Edison, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Jo Jones, Chick Webb, Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young | |||||
7 | 'Dedicated to Chaos' | 1940–1945 | Bebop, racism, swing music, World War II | January 23, 2001 | |
Personalities: Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, Artie Shaw, Billy Strayhorn, Ben Webster | |||||
8 | 'Risk' | 1945–1956 | Bebop, drug abuse, West Coast jazz | January 24, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Paul Desmond, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Norman Granz, Billie Holiday, John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker | |||||
9 | 'The Adventure' | 1956–1961 | Avant-garde jazz, free jazz | January 29, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan | |||||
10 | 'A Masterpiece by Midnight' | 1961–2001 | Bossa nova, civil rights movement, jazz fusion, jazz revival | January 31, 2001 | |
Personalities: Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Wynton Marsalis, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor |
Response and criticism[edit]
Jazz was nominated for several awards, including multiple Emmy Awards.
Positive reviews[edit]
Among the critics with a positive response, Charles Paul Freund wrote that Jazz 'is filled with rewards, many of them proffered unintentionally... Burns's 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.'[4] Jason Van Bergen said, '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's Jazz would be better suited for a Master's Thesis' than to his brief review. Van Bergen concluded, 'Burns's 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.'[5]
Negative reviews[edit]
The series also received criticisms from reviewers. Critic Jeffrey St. Clair wrote,
Ken Burns's 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 as 'Ellington is our Mozart.' He sees jazz as an 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.[6]
Critic David Adler wrote,
'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.'[7]
Stu Vandermark's detailed review of Jazz contended that there were substantial factual errors in the documentary. He noted that the series repeats the idea 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.'[8]
Compilation albums[edit]
On November 7, 2000, 22 companion single-artist compilation albums, all titled Ken Burns Jazz, were released by the Verve and Columbia/Legacy labels.[2] A five CD box set, Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America's Music, was also released, along with a single album sampler of that box set (The Best of Ken Burns Jazz).
The following albums were released by Verve:
- Count Basie - Allmusic link
- Art Blakey - Allmusic link
- John Coltrane - Allmusic link
- Ella Fitzgerald - Allmusic link
- Dizzy Gillespie - Allmusic link
- Coleman Hawkins - Allmusic link
- Billie Holiday - Allmusic link
- Charlie Parker - Allmusic link
- Sonny Rollins - Allmusic link
- Sarah Vaughan - Allmusic link
- Lester Young - Allmusic link
The following albums were released by Columbia/Legacy:
- Louis Armstrong - Allmusic link
- Sidney Bechet - Allmusic link
- Dave Brubeck - Allmusic link
- Ornette Coleman - Allmusic link
- Miles Davis - Allmusic link
- Duke Ellington - Allmusic link
- Benny Goodman - Allmusic link
- Herbie Hancock - Allmusic link
- Fletcher Henderson - Allmusic link
- Charles Mingus - Allmusic link
- Thelonious Monk - Allmusic link
- Various Artists - The Best of Ken Burns Jazz - Allmusic link
- Various Artists - Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America's Music - Allmusic link
In 2002, Columbia also released two low-priced box sets, each containing three of the previously released single-artist collections.
- Ken Burns Jazz, Vol. 1 (Includes Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman compilations) - Allmusic link
- Ken Burns Jazz, Vol. 2 (Includes Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck compilations) - Allmusic link
References[edit]
- ^ ab'Episode Descriptions'. Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns website. Arlington, Virginia: PBS. Retrieved 2013-10-30.
- ^ ab'Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings and The Verve Music Group To Jointly Release Recordings From 'JAZZ,' a Film by Ken Burns'. PRNewswire. Cision. August 9, 2000. Archived from the original on August 15, 2000. Retrieved June 11, 2019 – via Yahoo.com.
- ^ abMark Gilbert, Amazon.co.uk review
- ^Charles Paul Freund, 'Epic Jazz', Reason magazine online, January 8, 2001
- ^Jason Van Bergen, 'Ken Burns: Jazz'Archived 2005-05-07 at the Wayback Machine, December 11, 2002
- ^Jeffrey St. Clair, 'Now, That's Not Jazz', February 28, 2001. Reprinted in Oct. 2014 in CounterPunch.
- ^Adler, David R. 'Ken Burns's JAZZ: The Episode Ten Fiasco', no publication date noted
- ^Stu Vandermark, 'A Ken Burns's Jazz Post-Mortem'
External links[edit]
- Ken Burns' Jazz on PBS
- Ken Burns on PBS
- Ken Burns' Jazz on IMDb
- Jazz Greats in One Immortal 1958 Image (NYT, September 25, 2018)
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