By Nils Jacobson
Ken Burns, creator of Baseball and The Civil War, returns to public TV in January with his new 10-part, 19-hour series simply entitled Jazz.
Jazz combines music and images from this distinctly African-American art form with narration by jazz and Hollywood luminaries alike: Wynton Marsalis occupies the chair as "senior creative consultant," while Keith David handles most of the narration.
In a truly multimedia marketing effort, the Jazz series will appear in coordination with a 512-page book by Burns and Geoffrey Ward, Jazz: An Illustrated History, in November--as well as a series of recordings on Columbia/Legacy & The Verve Music Group. The new music includes a single-disc overview collection; 22 different artist-specific discs; and a 5-CD box set featuring most of the music from the series.
For those interested in the early history of jazz, Burns provides a wealth of history and footage in his television series. The first nine episodes of the series cover the period from the turn of the century until 1960, with emphasis on American artists. However, Burns compacts jazz after 1960 into a single final episode. The forty years prior to the '60s receive TEN times more coverage than the forty years starting in 1960. Likewise, the book devotes a single chapter to this period, or less than 10% of the total page count. The companion recordings include a sparse allotment of jazz from the last four decades. One question we might like to ask Mr. Burns: Did baseball end in 1960, too?
Publicity for the series refers to a "search for identity and authenticity in the 1970s, l980s and 1990s," which presumably justifies the omission of most of the improvised music from this period. [How does one search for authenticity? Never mind.] After Elvis came on the scene in the '50s--and R&B and rock music acquired mass popularity--jazz as a genre sank from the popular horizon. Burns explains this process as a consequence of jazz's "search for relevance" through the periods of development of free jazz and fusion. The deaths of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in the '70s, according to series publicity, "seems to mark the end of the music itself."
Fortunately for today's jazz listener, Wynton Marsalis led the young lions to a new jazz Renaissance. (Meanwhile, jazz record sales continue to hover under 3% of industry sales in general.) We've heard this story before. Those who subscribe to the rediscovery of traditional jazz forms celebrate the young artists of the '80s and '90s who continue to work within this sound. Meanwhile, the rest of the jazz world builds upon the lessons of free jazz, fusion, and the avant garde--without the convenient spotlight of a PBS series, a Marsalis/Crouch retrograde celebration, or the multimedia fanfare that accompanies this well-coordinated back-patting session.
Burns put it quite clearly in an October Denver Post interview. Before starting this project, Burns explains, "I had maybe two jazz CDs in my entire collection." Fortunately, in making Jazz, he had the help of senior creative consultant Wynton Marsalis--who made it clear in a 1995 interview (as well as in other places) that the avant garde "...is not my favorite kind of music. I don't even like it, to be honest with you."
When pinned down on the subject of mostly ignoring the bulk of four decades of jazz history, Burns had the following comments (USA Today, October 13). "Let's be fair, I'm an amateur historian, and I haven't taken a formal course since American History in the 11th grade," Burns says. "How could I presume to tell, (in) the current jazz scene, who's great... History begins 30 to 40 years out; after that it stops being history and starts being journalism." So, if he's not a historian, and he's not a journalist, one must ask the obvious question: who does Ken Burns think he is? 'Filmmaker' is way too easy an answer.
In an accompanying USA Today interview, Burns noted, "[T]his is a history, and so the bulk of our series is pre-1970." [An understatement, to be fair.] "I consider the modern era the province of contemporary critics and journalists. Not enough water has passed under the bridge to make historical judgements of the past thirty years." Yet again Burns excuses himself from making historical judgments that nonetheless appear blatantly in his work.
This give-and-take leaves us with a few simple questions. Is exclusion not a statement in and of itself? What about the pioneering musicians of free jazz, fusion, and the avant garde from 1960 to the present? Do they not count as jazz musicians?
"The jazz community has done the worst job of selling itself," Burns said. "They are always squabbling about what's real jazz and what's not..."
I guess the creative improvising musicians from the '60s onward just never convinced Burns--or his 'creative' team--that they play jazz.
