Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America’s Music

Review

Ken Burns Jazz – The Story of America’s Music collects 94 tracks of music on five CDs along with 48 pages of annotation, explanation, and photographic documentation. It’s all in the service of telling a tale of Americans working together, overcoming differences and conflicts, and moving toward a common goal. The general backdrop, of course, is the development of an indigenous music and its intertwinings with American life throughout the 20th century. But the central characters of this boxed-set story are really Burns, by now this country’s pre-eminent documentary filmmaker; the producers at PBS, the original if no longer the dominant national television network; and the staffs of two major record labels, Verve and Columbia Legacy, who, in combination, possess a significant slice of jazz’s history in their vaults.

Before it can be appreciated as a telling of jazz’s tale, Ken Burns Jazz needs to be considered as the landmark in jazz promotion that it is. Burns is one of few Americans – maybe the only one – who could commandeer some 20 hours of television time dedicated to jazz, a music that, despite its rich history, now appeals to only a small minority of American ears. Burns has surrounded his 10-part PBS documentary with a book, a five-CD boxed set, a 20-track “best of” CD, and 22 single-artist discs that compile the work of artists profiled in the series. The musical output represents a rare and historic union of two companies that regularly compete for market share in jazz’s reissue bins (and that’s where much of the action is these days).

But this is about raising jazz’s market share overall, and one need only read the evangelical zeal of Burns’ liner notes to appreciate that. That’s something we need not – in fact, should not – look at cynically. If the record executives are hopping on Burns’ bandwagon, it’s for a good reason: Besides the fact that jazz isn’t heard all that much by general audiences, even when it is heard, it lacks context. For most people, jazz needs a storyline, a framework. Burns focused his lens in an effort to do just that, and it may prove to be the most powerful vehicle to drive jazz sales since the “young lions” movement of the early 1990s, when Wynton Marsalis and others were the focal points of resurgent interest in jazz.

As with that movement, discontent is likely to ripple throughout the jazz community in reference to the five-CD set. “What about Jackie McLean?” they’ll cry. “Is Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Manteca’ all there is to Afro Cuban jazz?” they’ll shout. “What about artists playing in clubs today, like Joe Lovano and Geri Allen and Greg Osby?” And let’s not even talk about free improvisation. There are omissions to catch the eye of nearly any jazz lover.

But that’s not the point. Ken Burns Jazz is the accompaniment to a film – the story as Burns tells it. In Burns’ 10-part telling, the first nine episodes run through 1961, with the last summarizing the music since. This decision is a clear point of controversy, especially for those whose ears are more attuned to recordings of the ’60s and beyond. Burns firmly contends that he is a historian, that he’s telling a story of the inspiration behind the development of jazz.

Those taking Burns’ project overall as a manifesto – that jazz stopped decades ago – are overreacting or misinterpreting. Taken on its own terms, a good deal of important detail is imparted as Discs One, Two, and Three move through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. As one would expect, heaping helpings of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are laid out. There’s also some music that helped give rise to jazz, like a 1919 recording of James Reese Europe’s 369th U.S. Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band, two early Jelly Roll Morton tracks, and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, recorded in 1923. The first four discs support Burns’ story quite well – that is to say, he succeeds in setting the music in a meaningful context for general listeners. But Disc Five, which moves from Armstrong’s 1963 version of “Hello, Dolly!” to the Miles Davis Quintet’s “E.S.P.” (1965) to Herbie Hancock’s 1983 MTV hit “Rockit” before ending with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” seems a confused hodgepodge – an attempt to cover too much ground. That’s not surprising: Burns’ story doesn’t really deal in-depth with free jazz, fusion jazz, hip-hop jazz or contemporary forms of any stripe. He’s waving the flag of jazz as sewn by its founders. And if this box sends listeners off to fill in the gaps or extend the tale themselves, there are any number of satisfying sequels to assemble.

— Larry Blumenfeld, JAZZIZ Magazine Copyright © 2000, Milor Entertainment, Inc. — From Jazziz