That would be great. Again, it kind of highlights the point that Burns getting any 10-hour jazz documentary on TV at all is something to be celebrated. Because I don't see anyone out there taking on the challenge of doing your proposed 50s through 70s jazz documentary.
I thought Burns made a lot of mistakes as well (no Scott Joplin?) but the important thing is it got aired at all. That is not to be overlooked. So thank you for saying this.
All fine, but the continued emphasis on certain people when they were no longer innovators and the fact that quite a few people who were also important for the development of jazz were ignored or hardly mentioned and also the fact that hardly any or no attention was paid to modern and more advanced jazz make this documentary biased (which is always a bad thing for documentaries in my view) and not worth the title of "The Story of Jazz".
You're welcome. Us folks with intense interests tend to forget this. Burns is a storyteller who likes to follow a select group of people from the beginning to the end of their story. To not do that would make the thing completely dry and unappealing to most out there in TV Land including the people who put up the money for something like this.
There were some. They weren't ignored, but there wasn't nearly as much about Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck or Bill Evans as was warranted, to say nothing of Lenny Tristano or Lee Konitz.
I knew almost nothing going into it, save for a handful of Miles Davis CDs, and I was riveted by the series. Bought probably a half dozen of Ken Burns Jazz CDs and went deeper from there. Many of my coworkers at the time were talking about it at work too.
Lack of Video clips and his rip pictures out of books style and of course he wasn't even a real Jazz fan ,lead to a forgettable history lesson which spends its time on things other than music ,but all documentaries nowadays can't afford the music ,even little old Jazz and its tiny fan base is too expensive for PBS , Thank God at least some Jazz is located on those Jazz Icons dvds ,and many lps and Books
I've never seen it but it sounds like it would have had to run for 2 years to give everyone's personal faves equal screen-time.
A story of jazz should not be about one's personal favourites, but about the origins and the development of the music and the innovators who made it happen, whether one likes them or not.
Funny reading that review ,the reviewer loses the point of why the Burns show is so Lame ,and is almost as lame a Jazz fan....thank God I won't have to watch his stupid view of Jazz in 7 episodes ,it would be better ,but still not any good
If anything else, it showed a short clip of this. And for that alone, I''m eternally grateful it aired. Mind-blowing stuff!
Personal faves was the wrong term, I just meant that to give all those mentioned here so far equal measure would have extended the run time quite a bit. Just an observation that's all.
I dunno, I thought the thing was a pretty decent 30K foot fly-over history of jazz in its broad outline. No doubt the earlier segments were better -- but there was also less diversity to try to capture and explain, and more consensus about the early history. That said, I haven't watched it since the original program aired almost 15 years ago, so who remembers, but I don't remember a kind of polemical bias, just a lot of glossing over stuff, which of course seemed inevitable. The world of jazz fans (and musicians for that matter) is so full of beefs and polemical disagreements, we can -- and it seems like, do -- find anything to argue about while mostly jazz becomes more and more marginal to the music public at large. In that context I'm with the folks who thought on balance the whole enterprise was a good thing to just exist at all, and some of the early stuff, especially the early stuff on Armstrong was downright memorable. I also think St. Clair, who writes in the linked-to piece: "Ken Burns' 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-n-roll, funk and hip hop." Is more wrong, and more myopic in his premises -- that jazz sprang from the blues, or that everything else in 20th century American music did as well than he criticizes Burns for being. Blues was one input into those musics, hardly the sole input and perhaps not even the primary input, certainly not the primary input for jazz (frankly European harmony and European band instruments and Carribbean, not blues, many be more direct influences than blues), and blues as we know it today, formally, might even post date jazz, tho' pre-blues African American music traditions certainly exist. Did people do so much beefing, even still nearly 15 years later, about Scorese's Blues series or the PBS Rock and Roll history series? What is it about us jazz fans?
If anything, the show, IMO, is a mirror to why 'rock' is in it's 'death throws'. The inner-arguments as to what exactly IS Jazz, seems to lead to the death of 'progression'; when you go too 'far-out', there no way to go but, 'back'. I think rocks been doing that for the past ten years. And the small hand-full that are still going 'far-out' have long since been forgotten by the masses.
Actually, I'll simply say that it's as if he'd done a series called The Bible and concentrated mostly on the Genesis. 'Nuff said!
Exactly, it was amazing that much airtime given to Jazz, for non aficionados to perhaps gain appreciation. I give thanks to Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis for that. Stanley Crouch can take a rocket to the moon.
Wish I could find the whole thing, but this was from "Jazz - A Very Long Film By Ken Burns" on the allaboutjazz.com site back in the day. This sums it all up nicely: Announcer: In 1964, John Coltrane was at his peak, Eric Dolphy was in Europe, where he would eventually die, the Modern Jazz Quartet was making breakthrough recordings in the field of Third Stream Music, Miles Davis was breaking new barrier with his second great quintet, and Charlie Mingus was extending jazz composition to new levels of complexity, to name just a few. But we're going to talk about Louis singing "Hello Dolly" instead.
I would have to respectfully disagree that it was a victory for jazz--maybe a victory for Marsalis, Crouch, and Burns--but not jazz, in my opinion. Why? Because for many people that I've talked to, Ken Burns' Jazz is all they know of jazz, aside from the music itself. This is really sad to me because, in presenting such a narrow and falsely tidy picture of the music's history, it strips jazz of a lot of what makes it thrilling to listen to. That is, while there's plenty in the music itself to make it fun and interesting to hear, when you know all the politics and people that it came out of, and all the twists and turns it took along the way, jazz music becomes richer and more satisfying. I will agree that the narrative of the documentary is compelling (even when mis-informative), and if it gets new people interested in jazz, that's a good thing.
Crouch actually wrote some really interesting articles for Jazztimes before he was fired for being too controversial. I don't necessarily agree with everything he wrote, but he was always thought provoking.
Everyone I knew who listened to jazz trashed this series for the very same reasons. I only met one person who praised it as a GREAT documentary - an associate producer of a handful of PBS docs who was far from a jazz expert and completely oblivious to all the criticism this show got when it was released. (She even denied this happened, when all she had to do was google it: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/21/movies/l-jazz-40-years-missing-496677.html ) Can't wait to see how Burnsy handles country music next!
Speaking of Stanley Crouch, I think he would take issue with your premise that jazz isn't rooted in the blues. His opinion is that White critics try to disassociate jazz from the blues as a way to take credit for the music away from African Americans. Just mentioning this because it is an interesting counter point to to your equally interesting argument.
