Yes, it irritated the hell out of me also. I absolutely detest Burns documentary "formula". Try watching one of his multiple episode docs on DVD and it will drive you crazy I guarantee.
Ken Burns has made quite a few great documentary series over the years so I'll cut him slack on the jazz series. His Civil War series was and is an amazing series that still is an emotional viewing experience for me. I love the baseball series too.
I did not like it.... I liked seeing some priceless footage for the first time, I liked the interest it created in jazz but it really felt more like Marsalis and Crouch Jazz than anything else... and they have a particular view/slant
I've watched a lot of these music documentaries over the years and no matter what material the director focuses on, someone will find fault because undoubtedly there will be something or someone important left out. You would would have to have at least 25 hour long episodes to do these things justice. I liked Ken Burns Jazz because I did learn new things that I had not know before. That has to be worth something right there.
This is what upset me the most--I was hoping-praying for a HUGE Scott Joplin episode. Actually, in the Land of My Dreams, Ken Burns would do a series just on Joplin all by his lonsesome.
This isn't a case of a handful of subjective omissions, Jazz had problems with its overall, fundamental approach. The best that could be said of it was the archival material, it had a lot of it, but in all honesty, you expect that with a multimillion dollar PBS show with a boatload of researchers. I guess we can call it a great clip show. A great documentary or a great historical overview? Hell no. To be fair, the show did give jazz sales a notable boost, I will give it that….but it didn't last very long. Jazz is even more marginalized now than ever before.
I was glad "Ken Burns Jazz" was made and aired... but like I said: it left the interpretation about Jazz completely to two people with the same view/agenda: Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch... highly problematic....and not very professional. It crosses the line from documentary to opinion...
I had a love hate relationship with the series. Loved Jazz being promoted and getting to see some fantastic archival material. Hated the short shrift given to the later Jazz and many of my favorite artists. It was Jazz according to Wynton and I think that was the mistake. Despite the short comings it was good that it was actually made and aired on a major network.
So imagine this PSB special mini-series—the Ken Burns History of Rock and Roll in ten parts. We begin with Chuck Berry and we stay focused on Chuck Berry throughout because it fits Burns' Narrative. Forget about Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, the real roots of Rock. A lot of time is devoted to the Beatles and Beach Boys because the "experts" cited have a compelling argument that this represents the apotheosis of Rock and Roll. Everything past 1969 is given short shrift. Punk is cited as an aberration that essentially kills off Rock and Roll, Metal is given something like five minutes of coverage, Hip Hop isn't cited at all. And not a single song is played from the beginning to the end. That's what Ken Burns "Jazz" feels like to me, constrained by a pre-existing narrative that isn't true in the first place.
Does the CD series which accompanied the documentary exhibit the same p.o.v./bias(es) as the series itself?
A quick look at the period covered by the episodes sums it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(TV_series)#Episodes 6 episodes to get to the start of WWII and the Bebop era 3 episodes to get from 1940 to 1961 1 episode for 1961 to 2001 IIRC the final episode got to the 70s was a case of "well, not much that was any good happened until Dexter's triumphant return to the US and the emergence of Wynton...and phew...we got proper jazz back again from the jazz rock people".
I've heard that argument and I understand that there is a cultural value to properly understanding the African-American contribution to Jazz, but unfortunately in practice it comes at the expense of deliberately distorting Jazz history to minimise the importance of anyone who wasn't African-American. Given that all the poster icons of Jazz were already African-American, I'm never convinced that this is a battle that needed to be fought with such zeal.
I have a problem with just about anything that tries to codify a subject.That's possibly why I was never a history buff;I didn't have an interest in politics till I had the right to vote.Then,in the moment,I wanted my choice to be based on what I knew.So then I needed to know what happened in the past to make a decison in the present about the future.As for Jazz-I didn't take the chronolgoical path that Burns and others have done.Its been a combination of forced spoonfeeding,followed by a la carte.The spoonfeeding came from exposure to this music via commercial radio in the mid-'60s.The choice is made and you either listened or turned away. So I was exposed to lots of soul/jazz material like Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery.I picked up DownBeat(little else around)which exposed me to at least the idea that there was something else out there.I have always felt that books left me cold in trying to tell the story.Jazz is an "in the moment" sound and the tedious idea of listening to ragtime,stride,etc.in chronological order to get to Anthony Braxton didn't work if I wasn't ready for it.For a while,I felt that somehow I wasn't getting it because gods like Charlie Parker didn't click with me,though I picked up on Horace Silver immediately.Making the connection from Bird to Silver,no matter how obvious it may look today,just wasn't happening to me.But as long as Horace kept me bopping,it didn't matter.As with many things in life-time and money have much to determine results.It would be decades till I understood Bird(I think I do now),but it's OK.Same situation with Kind of Blue.In fact,I probably listened to 100 hours of Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley before I approached Kind of Blue head on.This seems to be just the opposite of most folks,including many a forum member here,but it just is.One thing I don't have is a revered altar to Miles in general and KOB in particular.Amazing material?Yes. Be all,end all?No.A major reason why I stopped doing volunteer radio jazz shows is that most of the other programmers seemed to be stuck in that KOB noose.Even new recordings they played seemed to stem from KOB more than any other kind of jazz.Two areas of passion for me-that souljazz stuff I was weaned on,and long form big band(e.g.- Thad Jones/Mel Lewis ensemble and the Akiyoshi/Tebakin orchestras)didn't seem to fit in with the other programmers idea of what jazz is,so I dropped out.As a listener,I would have trouble following the logic of daily listening of one night of modal musings,folowed by a night of 20 minute orchestral opuses,followed by a return to KOB. I came into this music around the time of John Coltrane leaving it.Johnny,I hardly knew ye.I distinctly remember reading a letter in DownBeat forecasting that there would be recordings of Coltrane coming forward,no matter how obscure or unexpected the source, and fans would drink it all,whether it was of value or not.Well,these past few weeks saw a commercial release of a radio recording of a sparsely attended Coltrane show,basically in his adopted hometown,just nine months before his passing.Almost 50 years since that letter was posted,they're still finding stuff.Is it of value?There are lots of reviews flying around about this release and many caution that this stuff is not for the weak of heart,but demands your attention. So what does it all mean?Well,I'll direct you to Harrsion Ridley Jr.,termed a "building engineer" for the Philadelphia School District(read- a high school educated janitor),who hosted a radio show titled "The Historical Approach To The Positive Music".This "historical approach" was not a chronological map of jazz.He took an artist,sometimes a period, and,for four hours, explored the subject with example,usually just playing cut after cut from his collection(believed to be one of the biggest by one individual),with the simple remark about it all-"Yes indeedy".One could learn more in four hours from Harrison than the total of Mr. Burns' project.Harrison always came off the vibe that you just gotta hear this next tune.And Harrison was very approachable;I called him a few times and he was just excited to talk about jazz...er...the positive music,off air to an indiviual as he would be seconds later, hanging up and opening up the microphone to the masses. For a while,I thought about being a teacher.But one thing I've learned is that how one is taught and how one learns are two different things.Burns and his ilk have tried to teach me lots-I learned from Ridley.
What? Jazz didn't pander to the hipster audience by deciding to not treating Miles and Coltrane like Gods? Blasphemous!!
"Jazz" didn't appeal to fans of Jazz music because far too much was left out, great music was dismissed by disgruntled "experts", far too much time was spent on Louis Armstrong at the expense of everything else and the punchline was that Jazz essentially was killed of by the more challenging music of the post-bop era. To have a program theoretically extolling the virtues of Jazz that ends by insisting that 'Jazz is dead' indicates that the people involved in the production really aren't into Jazz.
That will be an interesting comparison, as both musics have an early history that is fairly well agreed upon, then various stylistic developments and high points followed by a long, slow splintering and/or watering down, and there is a certain point after which many fans feel the music lost it's way and ceased to be relevant, at least the dominant, mainstream versions of it. It's not a surprise that many jazz fans feel about Return To Forever the way country fans feel about Garth Brooks. Burns seems more at home digging through old, forgotten places anyway, so I suspect there will be a similar bias towards the early years, with brief nods towards Bakersfield and outlaw country and effectively ending with Cash's last recordings followed by 10 seconds on how everything since sucks. Given the huge commercial success of modern country, though, the people paying the money may demand a different approach. It's also worth mentioning that the typical PBS viewer (and vast majority of humans) would not sit still for an hour of atonal skronking on their tv sets, they'd be at the changer before the baby woke up screaming. I say to train the little one's ears early, but, you know, I am not in charge...
What I've come to expect from Burns is an exhaustive look into a specific subject. My hopes and expectations were high while watching the first few episodes. I kept thinking how great the episodes would be once he leaves the old behind. The old never left as he was still covering it 9/10 into the series.
That chronology speaks volumes. A more balanced approach would have served the genre immensely. I've never seen the DVDs from the series - do they include footage not originally broadcast? I know The Beatles Anthology series did this.
I know he would. And typically of Crouch, he'd be conflating a racial and polemical and political point with a musicological one that would be obscuring his view of history in favor of a story that supports his polemical needs. I'd never argue that jazz isn't principally African American music in its historical origins and that it doesn't have predecessors in African American musical traditions. I'm saying: A) anyone who has actually studied American vernacular music of the colonial era through the present can't find much of the blues per se as a music form as we know it today before around 1903; that we have people around then saying they heard something like that -- people like W.C. Handy and Charles Peabody -- suggests that it must have existed before that, but how much before who knows? And that places it more or less contemporaneous with the emergence of jazz, not a precursor to it. B) there were other pre-blues African-American and African-Caribbean musical tradition of the colonial era through to the emergence of jazz that may have influenced jazz -- things like ring shouts, spiritual singing where microtonally bent thirds and sevenths remained alive through the colonial era, vernacular playing of African-derived instruments in the new world like the banjo, Yoruban derived rhythmic syncopation that stayed alive in the Caribbean basin that was more closely connected to the African than the new world that bestowed on jazz Jelly Roll Morton's "Latin tinge" (since the Carribbean slaves, working sugar plantations, were viciously worked to death and new slaves were constantly being imported vs. North American slavery where generations of American born enslaved people where much more common); but at most blues as a distinct formal practice was just one of those inputs, and it may not have even been that. C) Jazz didn't emerge in an African American vacuum. It emerged played on European American band instruments, using European American harmony in the new world. It emerged out of the experience of African Americans in the new world, an experience that long featured a cross hybridizing of black and white forms and not just white folks taking from black folks; whether it was parodic imitation of white music and dance in the cakewalk, or in the slave era the best slave musicians being force to play for dances at the big house and learning the latest 18th century dance music and vernacular white music as a result, or in the emergence of a clear predecessor to jazz -- ragtime -- at the hands of a cat like Joplin with training in and ambitions for European classical harmony and form, the European-American impact on the development of African American music has rarely gotten the kind of musicological attention that the African-American impact on European-American music continually gets, but jazz would never have emerged without African American exposure to European American harmony and instrumental forms. It's common for folks to summon the specter of the blues in an attempt to confer some sort of purity and authenticity to whatever point they're trying to make, hell, WC Handy himself told some shaggy dog story about hearing a slide guitar player by the railroad tracks in Mississippi to give his "Yellow Dog Blues" (originally titled "Yellow Dog Rag," because, well, rag was a thing blues not so much yet) an air of authenticity. But real human history is much more complex and dynamic than polemicists and ideologues and reductive thinkers need it to be.
This makes me think of Charlie Patton and how much of his "Blues" was more akin to ragtime than Robert Johnson or Even Bessie Smith.
