Jazz
Filmed by Florentine Films and WETA. Producers, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick; co-producers, Peter Miller, Victoria Gohl; associate producers, Sarah Botstein, Natalie Bullock Brown, Shola Lynch; director, Ken Burns; writer Geoffrey C. Ward.
Narrator: Keith David.
In an overlong exploration of one of America's great contributions to culture, Ken Burns' "Jazz" tests the patience of fans of his sprawling documentaries as well as of this American music. What the mega-docu delivers are some great clips of great artists that are rarely seen; what it lacks is a sense of celebration and joy, and it fails to establish, in its first hours, how important jazz has been to the fabric of American culture and that, no matter how close to death the music has come, there are always rescuers who revive it.
"Jazz," which has the same stylistic texture as Burns' "Baseball," is about snapshots that capture a moment in time. Those moments are analyzed and, at times, given some 20/20 hindsight, but generally left as a notch on a timeline, with viewers left to make their own interpretations as they enjoy the wall-to-wall music on the sound track. Outside of the interviews conducted for the show, 90% of the scenes are in black & white, giving the music a distant air more museum-worthy than living art form.
"Jazz" is presented in 10 episodes, with all segs coming in just under two hours. Burns and writer Geoffrey C. Ward organize the 19 hours chronologically and then spend untold amounts of energy fighting that plan. As one person's story leads into another, the filmmakers invariably need to turn the calendar back -- and the U-turns from one man's accomplishments to another's birth, sometimes 20 years apart, can be jarring.
There are undeniable truths about jazz, and "Jazz" gets a few of them right. It is an urban musical form. It is music that mostly attracts adults, though its innovators usually started performing while in their teens. Like all American musical forms, it was at its most popular when it was dance music and most misunderstood when it was seen as "art." Its progression has been steered by individual innovators.
On the plus side, "Jazz" gives a complete portrait of Louis Armstrong, one that certainly will help elevate his status with casual jazz fans and possibly generate renewed study into his importance to the United States and music. "The more you listen to jazz, the more you hear Louis, Louis, Louis," rightfully says critic Gary Giddins, who authored the superb Armstrong biography "Satchmo."
The other central figure in "Jazz" is Duke Ellington, whose portrait feels surprisingly unfinished, part of which is attributable to his own introverted personality, keeping at arm's length any answers about what made him tick. Both men, who along with Charlie Parker created standards by which each successor has been measured, are included in almost every episode, their stories beginning in Part 2, "The Gift."
"Jazz" has been marketed more as a jazz show than a television event on par with "Baseball"; for the casual observer or jazz fan who was weaned on bebop, the docu series may well not strike a particularly resonant note until Part 6 ("The Velocity of Celebration"). It's 1937 and the big bands are disintegrating as the Depression deepens, giving way to the jam sessions of Kansas City where Count Basie and Lester Young reign, and Charlie Parker is growing up.
From there, Burns and writer Ward tackle Parker and the rise of bebop (Part 7); the divisiveness of the jazz community in the 1950s (Part 8); Miles Davis and the struggle jazz faced in finding an audience in the 1960s (Part 9); and finally, the music's comatose state and rebirth in the early 1980s (Part 10).
Episode five, "Swing" -- arguably the best night of the series -- covers the return of Armstrong from the managerial troubles that kept him from recording for two years in the mid-1930s and goes on to cover the sharper bands of the time: Jimmie Lunceford ("greatest show band ever"); Tommy Dorsey, who turned the trombone into a singing instrument; Artie Shaw and his combination of chamber music and jazz; and the one-nighter tours that brought the music to the heartland. In tandem is the rise of dance bands, almost exclusively white, that manage to play swing without playing jazz.
That seg is filled with delightful shots of musicians on the side of the road and their home movies between gigs. Camaraderie more than anything is celebrated here; all you need on the road, trumpeter Bunny Berigan is quoted as saying, "is a toothbrush and a photo of Louis Armstrong."
In the later segments, the history of the music is allowed to unfold at a comfortable gait. The first four episodes, however, are compartmentalized and presented within a social context peripheral to the music. They never run a theme forward -- suggesting that an incident in, say, the mid-1930s, will have relevance in the '60s. (For example, one could get from the roots of swing to the avant garde in one step -- the relationship between composers and bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Sun Ra, whose name is never heard.)
While "Jazz" goes off on tangents to showcase a blues singer such as Bessie Smith, it ignores other, more applicable, lines: the social implications of the persecution of Paul Robeson or the acceptance in film of big bands and swing music. Context, which can include the stock market collapse and the KKK, does pay off when the subject is, of all things, France. (The country's relationship to jazz is made abundantly clear in short fashion.)
In Burns' hands, it's the first round of innovators who remain paramount. It's Sidney Bechet, Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. After that, the stories get shorter and the lives of musicians, such as Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, never conclude beyond their ascent. To be second best is to be relegated to short shrift: Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Art Tatum, Charles Mingus and Dexter Gordon are all under-explored.
"Jazz" also relies on a far-too-small group of talking heads, the most prominent being trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a disciple of Armstrong and celebrator of Ellington. In fact a more apt title for this enterprise might well be "The 20th Century According to Armstrong and Ellington."
Writer Stanley Crouch and Giddins, the finest jazz critic working today, offer the most salient points of the docu. Giddins' comments are succinct and clear, particularly accurate when he breaks down Armstrong's contributions: the trumpeter established jazz as a soloist's art form; he introduced a blues tonality; and created modern time by inventing swing. That analysis, along with anecdotes, are what "Jazz" needs -- too many innovations are explained through the use of technical terms such as "flatted fifths" or else by humming.
Crouch is more freewheeling, complimenting Ellington's working style with disparate musicians as "getting these knuckleheads to work together."
Marsalis accurately describes jazz as "attempting to achieve harmony through conflict" and he does demonstrate innovations on his trumpet, which has its interesting moments. He is out of line, however, when he speaks for Ellington and John Coltrane, suggesting he has first-hand information of their states of mind, in some cases long before he was born.
Wynton's brother, Branford, is much more on the money and comes up with a true nugget when he suggests Coltrane's great quartet of the early 1960s played as if they would die for each other and the music.
For all the interviews, clips and stills accumulated over six years, there is a shortage of musicians and anecdotes in the first eight hours. Writers, all of whom grew up after World War II, supply the lion's share of commentary, the "observers" are baseball player Buck O'Neill, actor Ossie Davis ("Duke taught us the true meaning of grace") and a couple of dancers from Harlem. The presence of pianist Jimmy Rowles and underutilized trumpeter Lester Bowie, both of whom died since taping their contributions, add so much depth to the piece that it's a wonder more musicians weren't sought out to contribute; a filmmaker more attuned to the music would've noticed.
Where, for example, are the men and women who worked in the swing and bebop years who are capable of relating first-hand accounts? Sonny Rollins, Anita O'Day, Hank Jones, Gerald Wilson, Ray Brown, Art Farmer, Jimmy Heath and Max Roach are just a handful of the people who were there who could have lent some insight in fresh interviews.
Stock footage has its problems, too. Photographs are used three and four times and some of the footage seems specious, as the commentary doesn't quite match what's being seen onscreen. And as much as the racial integration of Harlem's Savoy ballroom dominates this story, we see only one interracial couple dancing -- over and over.
One has to question Burns' passion for this subject -- he has already admitted to not knowing much about it before he started. And he has clearly bought into Wynton Marsalis' theories about what is and isn't important.
To read between the lines of his landmark docs -- "Civil Wars," "Baseball" and "Jazz" -- is to find a man fascinated by race and how America deals with segregation and integration. He never misses a chance to put the racial politics of the day into the story of "Jazz," regardless of its direct relationship to the music at hand.
Yet despite his interest in the subject, Burns curiously overlooks the complexity of the integration of the Benny Goodman band (with Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian) to settle for a simpler example of American racial divide: New Orleans' refusal to stage a concert featuring the black Armstrong and the white Jack Teagarden.
The first night is neither overview nor celebration of jazz (as we saw in "Baseball's" poignant first inning). Instead, it is stories of slavery, New Orleans and Creoles -- stories that, yes, have some import in the birth of jazz, but could largely go untold here.
There is one crucial fact that emerges in this preponderance of Behind the Behind the Music: Once the state of Louisiana instituted Jim Crow laws, light-skinned Creole musicians who were classically trained at white institutions were now relegated to second-class citizen status and forced to play in black blues bands, bringing considerable knowledge and style to the rudimentary music.
By detailing the first half of the 20th century -- and repeating facts, one assumes, so that nightly viewing isn't required -- certain aspects of the second half of the century receive minimal attention.
Bossa nova is touched upon as Stan Getz, a disciple of Lester Young, dips into a Brazilian songbook. Seg then asserts that Armstrong's 1964 recording of "Hello Dolly!" is the last time jazz will reach high on the charts -- despite the fact that six months later Getz and Astrud Gilberto's recording of "The Girl From Ipanema" reached No. 5 on the pop chart. Bossa nova, they neglect to mention, was the musical form that industry powers got behind in the hopes of stemming the tide of rock 'n' roll.
Similarly, the Marsalises and narrator Keith David sound the death knell for jazz in the mid-1970s, overlooking the commercial success of Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny or, more importantly, the innovative ensemble Weather Report, which kept the word jazz in the American vernacular through albums such as "Heavy Weather" and "Black Market" and the single "Birdland."
The show closes with a quick look at new stars, among them the brilliant bassist Christian McBride and the fiery saxophonist James Carter, but make no mention of the music's current hot commodity Diana Krall.
Rattling off names of musicians who don't merit a mention in this massive docu is too easy an exercise, and may amount to nitpicking, yet certainly the producers could have found room to include Ellington's bassist Jimmy Blanton, the pianist Oscar Peterson and trumpeter-singer Chet Baker.
More offensive is a lack of credit to the tunesmiths whose songs have formed the backbone of jazz. Beyond early references to Tin Pan Alley and how Armstrong reshaped pop songs, series never acknowledges the source material that has become the jazz canon, the songs of Johnny Mercer, Walter Donaldson, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and, especially, George Gershwin, whose name is never mentioned. Now that's an inexcusable oversight.
Camera, Buddy Squires, Burns; editors, Paul Barnes, Sandra Marie Christie, Lewis Erskine, Erik Ewers, Sarah E. Hill, Craig Mellish, Shannon Robards, Tricia Reidy, Aaron Vega; senior creative consultant, Wynton Marsalis; senior adviser, Dan Morgenstern. 19 HOURS.
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