By David R. Adler

Virtually every jazz critic has had a problem or two with the content of Ken Burns’s 19-hour PBS documentary Jazz. Most of the criticism has focused on the fact that many jazz greats go unmentioned. The film’s blind spots are unfortunate, but some are inevitable, and their impact on the accuracy of the film as a whole is not uniform. But Burns’s omissions begin to matter a lot more in his tenth and final episode, "A Masterpiece By Midnight," for here the recent past, present, and future of jazz finally emerge as the topics at hand. Up to this point, Burns has done a respectable job of introducing pre-1960 jazz history to a wide audience. In Episode Ten, however, he gives viewers a disastrously skewed portrait of the creative lineage that has produced much of today’s best jazz.

The problem can be reduced to Burns’s treatment of two major figures: Miles Davis and Cecil Taylor. Together they stand in as representatives, respectively, of the fusion and avant-garde movements that evolved over the course of the last three decades or so. It’s hard to say which fares worse in Burns’s cursory treatment, but let’s first consider fusion.

In subtle ways, Miles is depicted as a sellout, and even a vain imbecile, for pursuing the direction that led to Bitches Brew and beyond. The writer Gerald Early offers his opinion that Miles’s later bands tended to "fall apart," musically speaking, and the pronouncement stands without rebuttal. Does no one recall the band that graced Black Beauty, the 1970 concert album recently released by Columbia for the first time? Chick Corea, Steve Grossman, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Airto Moreira couldn’t make a band fall apart if they tried. More important, this record and others like it are the furthest thing from a commercial ploy designed to appeal to the masses. Quite the contrary, the 70s albums document what is arguably the least accessible music of Miles’s career. While it’s not surprising that Burns presents, with little or no countervailing opinion, the dim view of later Miles propounded over the years by Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, that doesn’t make it any less of a disgrace.

Having acknowledged Miles Davis’s birthing of what came to be known as fusion, the film stops with a stunningly vague comment about how more fusion bands soon emerged to follow Miles’s example. None are named. Thus is the music of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Headhunters, Weather Report, and Return to Forever written out of the history of jazz. In fact, the 1970s as a whole basically never happened in Burns’s view. It is left for Branford Marsalis, who knows better, to declare that "jazz just went away for a while."

During the course of the Miles discussion, Wynton Marsalis all but dismisses the electric guitar as a non-jazz instrument, closing off the possibility that Pat Metheny and John Scofield — both of whom drew considerable crowds while jazz was supposedly dead — made meaningful contributions to the music. The film, giving similar treatment to the electric bass (referred to ineptly in the script as "electronic" bass), also dispenses with the towering influence of Jaco Pastorius.

Turning to the avant-garde, Cecil Taylor emerges in Episode Ten as the only musician in the entire 19-hour epic who is directly and savagely criticized. Branford, in a seemingly out-of-context outburst, condemns a random remark of Taylor’s as "self-indulgent bullshit," and Gene Lees is then trundled on-camera to reprimand Taylor for "changing the vocabulary rather than using the vocabulary." After hearing Taylor get roughed up in such a fashion, one recoils at the footage of Duke Ellington that immediately follows. One wants to celebrate Duke, but no longer on Burns’s terms. Burns has cheapened the entirety of the music by this point. He owes Taylor, whom Howard Mandel recently called "the greatest living improvising pianist," a formal apology.

If neither fusion nor avant-garde musicians contributed anything of lasting significance, one might wonder: who has? Why, none other than the film’s senior creative consultant, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who is portrayed toward the end of Episode Ten as jazz’s "saving grace." Forget all the pro- and anti-Wynton arguments, for they’re not the point. Wynton’s coronation in the film is not merely biased. It is not just aesthetically grating. It is unethical, given his integral role in the making of the very film that is praising him to the heavens. Furthermore, it misleads by suggesting that all worthy post-1980s jazz has adhered to Wynton’s creative/ideological imperatives.

A documentary is allowed to contain praise, just as it is allowed to contain critique. But Burns’s film is radically lopsided in this regard. A tone of breathless enthusiasm permeates his first nine episodes. Critique suddenly surfaces in the tenth and final one, when the implications for present-day music-making become urgent. Responding to the charge that he short-changed modern jazz, Burns has explained that he is not an historian: "How could I presume to tell, (in) the current jazz scene, who’s great... History begins 30 to 40 years out." This is disingenuous, for Episode Ten is replete with historical judgments and thinly veiled agendas.

Burns could have made a great documentary, but instead he made a good documentary with a very poor ending.