Thoughts About Ken Burns's Jazz

Over the last month, I've been remedying a longstanding error by finally taking in the Ken Burns documentary, Jazz. I had wanted to see this film for years, but for various reasons have never had the opportunity to watch it from start to finish.

I sat down to watch the film with a Jazz education that largely revolved around "mid-later" legends such as Miles Davis and his profound Kind of Blue contributors, John Coltrane and Bill Evans--as well as select standouts like Dave Brubeck. I was not well versed in the catalogues of giants such as Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Parker, Holiday, Fitzgerald, etc, and I was very much looking forward to  Jazz to filling in some of the blanks. Burns's The Civil War and Baseball had already made me a fan of his filmmaking style and I was fairly confident that Jazz would be as comprehensive and entertaining as his previous work.

Briefly, the film was fantastic. It did a superb job of tracing the origins of Jazz back to the classically trained Creole musicians of 19th century New Orleans, southern black church spirituals, and the blues, and how the three were amalgamated as the hideous Jim Crow laws eventually made their way to New Orleans; through the art form's various permutations over the years, from the Dixieland mastery of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Syndey Bechet; through the swing era of Benny Goodman; into the bop of Gilespie and Charlie Parker; how that gave rise to Davis, Coltrane, the avante garde and other movements that followed; ending with modern masters such as Winton and Branford Marsalis. It has greatly expanded my Jazz vocabulary, and in particular has given me a new obsession: the music of Louis Armstrong (that alone was more than worth the price of my Netflix subscription). I'm slightly less obsessed with Duke Ellington. Slightly.

Speaking of Louie and the Duke, they are in this film a lot. A lot lot. If you love their music as I do, this will thrill you. If you don't, then you probably don't want to watch this documentary--because you probably don't like Jazz, period.

The picture is not perfect. It gives extreme short shrift to Jazz guitar, which is disappointing. Jazz the film makes mention of a mere two Jazz guitarists, the very two whom, had they been omitted, would have constituted an unpardonable sin: Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. I realize that Jazz for much of its history has been a brass and woodwind (and piano) dominated art form, but really: they couldn't devote five seconds to George Benson? Joe Pass? Pat Metheny? Wes Montgomery? The dearth of attention to the guitar was a glaring error in this critic's humble opinion. Related, but arguably less glaring, was the all-but-omitted Jazz sub genre of Fusion. This was covered ever so briefly in reference to Miles's re-invention of himself for his Bitches Brew album, but: John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Allan Holdsworth, Al Di Meola--all absent.

Perhaps this is because of a problem that seems recurrent in Burns's films: the ending. As was the case with Baseball, Jazz proceeds at a delightful pace through the first nine episodes and then rushes to cram several decades of material into the final minutes of the final episode. Burns does okay with a finite topic, such as the Civil War, but when the subject in question is open ended, the final episode becomes a train wreck. It's as if he's gets to the finale having edited the previous episodes sparingly, suddenly realizes "gee, we've got to finish this thing!" and proceeds to cram the proverbial 10 lbs of you-know-what into a 5 lb bag.  Whereas two entire episodes were devoted to the swing era alone, the finale rushes through about 40 years, from the latter days of Coltrane to Winton Marsalis and the generation beyond (the film was made in 2000).

Of course, these are my subjective gripes. Someone else might complain that, despite the 2 part swing episode, Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra combined got about 5 minutes of screen time in the entire 20+ hour documentary; or that Harry Connick Jr. didn't at least get some sort of honorable mention for re-igniting the country's passion for swing in the 80's and 90's.; or that Cole Porter was completely ignored. None of these really bothered me, but they didn't escape my notice either.

Quibbles aside, this documentary was a glorious education about the golden years of one what is possibly America's most brilliant contribution to the arts (I'm torn as to whether Jazz or the Blues is greater), and should be de rigueur for any student of 20th century humanities.