By Michael Zilber

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. First off, I’d like to dispense with the point that in actuality, Burns spent 16 hours on 100 years and 2 hours on 40 years. I’ll grant that the years 1863 to 1917 are all intrinsic in helping build the stew known as jazz and worth two hours of precious time IF the remaining periods are treated equitably. But the relevant numbers here are 14 and 2. 14 is the number of hours Burns spends on the 42 years between 1917 and 1960 and 2 is the number of hours Burns takes for the 39 years between 1961 and 2000. Even the years 1917 to 1924 are arguably not worth the two hours spent on them here. Jelly Roll Morton and Armstrong, viewed as the two key figures in early recorded jazz, didn’t press wax until 1925

I submit that the real history of jazz as a soloist’s art form began in the 1920s. Why? Thanks to Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and others who broke free of the collective front line born in the marching bands of New Orleans. Prior to 1925, with the possible exception of Sidney Bechet, individuals were not coming out from the front line. Armstrong’s creative powers and stunning virtuosity were so compelling that most historians (and this is one of the things that Reverend Marsalis and I agree on) credit him with virtually singlehandedly creating the idea of the jazz solo virtuoso. That happened around 1925, as did Jelly Roll Morton’s (the first great jazz composer) first recordings, so I contend that jazz, as a vehicle for extemporaneous solo creation dates from then, specifically the Hot Five recordings of Armstrong and the exquisite solos of Beiderbecke.

Whether or not you agree with this premise, I would hope you would agree that it is passing strange to spend as much time on an era where there is NO recorded documentation of the music, pre-1917, as on an era more widely recorded than any other – 1961-2000. If an artist is no longer with us we can no more speak intelligently about what h/she sounded like without having the recorded evidence of his/her work than we can credibly hold forth on the speaking ability of any president prior to TR. I repeat: There are NO recordings of any jazz group AT ALL before 1917. Buddy Bolden, icon so revered by Wynton and his crew, stopped performing in 1907. Hands up anyone over 93. O.K., the rest of you are just moving air to even venture an opinion. There is no doubt that Burns is a master at taking period photographs and inserting contemporary narration over it, but I draw the line at having 40 year old Wynton play what he thinks Buddy maybe sorta, coulda, mighta sounded like. Frances Davis has a particularly good take on this in The Atlantic Monthly. This at the expense of Bill Evans among many, many others!!! (By the way, check out the PBS web site. Evans doesn’t even rate a bio, despite the inclusion of section trombonists from the Ellington band of the 1950s.)

Lastly, even if you hold that the two hours spent on a time where there is no documentation of the sounds being created is reasonable, surely you will grant that spending two hours on the years 1935-37, which Burns does, seems a little out of balance, when only 2 hours are spent on the time between 1961 and 2000, and much of that two hours is spent falsely asserting that jazz had lost its way between 1965 and 1985 when Wynton Reagan Marsalis took over the joint.

So we understand, Burns spends as much time on a period where there is zero recorded evidence of the music as he does on the most extensively documented 40 years in the history of the music. That is utterly fraudulent in methodology and representation.

The Fetishization Of Louis Armstrong

Ah’m comin’ ‘lizabeth, ah’m comin’. Now Zilber’s dissing Saint Louis, ah’m comin’ ta meet yah, ‘lizabeth. Relax, take a beta blocker and read on:

Without Louis Armstrong there would be no jazz as we know it. He was the first great soloist in jazz, the man responsible for the whole idea of a soloist telling his story. Armstrong’s glorious sound, unhurried swing and exceptional virtuosity, coupled with an ebullient song-like lyricism, redefined what it meant to be a jazz musician. He set a whole new standard for improvisers (AND singers with his magnificent scatting). To paraphrase Newton, anyone playing jazz today is standing on the shoulders of giants and Armstrong is the original giant on whom all others balance.

I REALLY love Louis, honest. Can I get you a cold drink. Let me put West End Blues on the old victrola. O.K. Feel better now? HOWEVER! Armstrong’s fertile artistic period as an innovator was over by about 1932, and if you look at the Hot Five and Seven records as well as the duets with Earl Hines, we’re really talking about a five year period. Armstrong never moved past the stylistic approach of the late 1920s, and by the late 1930s artists such as Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Christian were far more developed harmonically, rhythmically and formally. This is not to demean Armstrong in any way. Without Armstrong, there would have been no Lester, Bird, Miles, Trane, Herbie, Liebman, Woody Shaw, and so on and so on.

And yet, it is equally absurd to hold Armstrong up as non pareil in terms of his musical substance. It’s like saying no one in physics, even Einstein, will ever be at the level of Newton. This is exactly what Burns and Marsalis assert. In interview after interview, Burns has a smug and prepackaged sophistry for anyone who challenges why Bill Evans, Herbie, Wayne Shorter, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea et al. get such short shrift. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Burns challenges his critics to name one person from the past 40 years as good as Louis, Duke, Bird or Miles and he’ll put them in. This from the fella who five years ago owned Kind of Blue, Love Supreme and a bunch of rock records. Well Ken baby, I’m not sure what you mean by good, but ya know, if Newton came back from the dead he would be utterly baffled and nonplussed by quantum physics of today. By the same token, drop Louis in any band of world-class current day jazz musicians, say Dave Douglas’ group or Dave Liebman’s, and the rhythms, harmonies, melodies, forms and tempos played would be so far in advance of anything conceived of by the Hot Five that poor Louis would be utterly flummoxed and bewildered. That doesn’t make one better than the other – it’s like comparing Mandarin and Provencal cuisine. It merely shows the thinness of Burns’ Marsalis-supplied line of defense.

1961-2000 The Big Lie

The iconicizing of Louis goes so far into retro-absurdity that Burns wastes valuable space on his companion CD set shoehorning in Armstrong’s kitschy rendition of Hello Dolly while at the same time finding no space on the 61-2000 CD for Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, John Mclaughlin, Wes Montgomery, Oregon, Mahavishnu, Dave Liebman, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Steps Ahead, and…I’ll stop here cause I’m trying to keep this thing under 4000 words. I don’t even think the most diehard early jazz fanatic would assert that Louis’ Hello Dolly ranks with Chick’s Now He Sings, Now he Sobs or Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer in importance, but to Burns/Marsalis, it is clearly more important.

I think the Burns/Marsalis party line is never more clearly stated than in the preamble to the last episode, covering 1961-2000. According to the film, jazz, by the early 1960s had lost its way. Hello Dolly and Girl from Ipanema excepted, Beatles and other nasty rock n’rollers were outselling jazz by large margins. (Never mind that Beboppers such as Bird and Diz never came close to the sales of Sinatra and Perry Como and that Elvis Presley outsold Miles’ biggest hit, Kind of Blue by ten to one.) Miles, according to the film, decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Yep, it’s a shame that Miles spurned such challenging fare as Hello Dolly for the obvious commercial pandering of Miles Runs The Voodoo Down and Agartha. Burns/Marsalis go on to hail Dexter Gordon’s return in 1976, purveying his smooth hard bop of the 1950s as saving jazz from itself: a vast sea of commercial, electric pandering and squawking ‘free’ jazz charlatans. Then a certain young trumpet terror from New Orleans came on the scene, coincidentally right at the same time as another retro figure, Ronald Reagan, and led the unwashed masses away from the slums of fusion and free, back to the sober, Italian-suited recreations of ever more distant forms of jazz. It’s a nice story. It’s also a fundamentally dishonest recounting of what happened in jazz after 1961. Master saxophonist Liebman has a great line. If you really want to know what’s happening, ask the musicians, and I mean other than the astoundingly reactionary Wynton Marsalis.

By the way, as discussed above, Wynton is the first influential jazz musician in the history of the music with not ONE innovation to his name. Furthermore, he is the first influential jazz musician in history who takes his cue from two NON-MUSICIANS, the afore-mentioned Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray. (This is the same Stanley Crouch who, in the Village Voice, dismissed Michael Brecker as a mere journeyman. 10 years later, Crouch decided to take a basic music theory class since he was going to be working on an opera with Marsalis. Heartening to know that after 20 years of absolutist pronouncements on jazz, Crouch finally learned how to play a C major triad on the piano. Never mind. That’s for another article on jazz criticism.)

Just what did Ken and Wynton leave out? Let’s start with the 60s, the decade in which, according to Burns/Marsalis, jazz lost its way. From Bossa Nova to Albert Ayler, an almost inconceivable range of jazz was created in that landmark decade. Let’s focus in on just three of the groups from the decade when jazz "lost its way". Most working jazz musicians consider that the hardest chunk of music to master is the music which began in about 1959 with Coltrane, Bill Evans and Miles Davis. They recognize that the extraordinary level of freedom AND control of materials exhibited by the Davis quintet, the Coltrane quartet and the Evans trio is unsurpassed and a rich lode of material for further development. The exceptional level of interplay and rich harmonic development by the Evans trio has informed everyone from Hancock to Corea to Jarrett to current star Brad Mehldau. The amazing conversations, break neck tempos, superimposed rhythms and densely free chromaticism of the Davis quintet has shaped every band from Woody Shaw to Dave Douglas to Wallace Roney to Tim Hagans. The powerful cantorial tenor of Coltrane in volcanic dialogue with Elvin Jones and the stretched harmonies of Tyner’s insistent fourths have marked every tenor player since Coltrane, including Wayne Shorter, Liebman, Mike Brecker, Kenny Garrett and Wynton’s brother.

Then we get to the 70s. I know it is not PC to say it, but the 1970s had a wealth of phenomenal music. Like the 30s, and the 50s, it was a time when the music became widely popular, with records such as Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and Weather Report’s Heavy Weather selling a million copies each. Like the 30s and the 50s, one has to separate the wheat from the chaff – so just as one makes a qualitative distinction between Count Basie and Glenn Miller, one needs to make a qualitative distinction between Grover Washington's "Mr. Magic" and Weather Report’s "The Juggler".

Incredibly, Burns, in his penurious allotment of post 1965 music (7 tunes), picks "Mr. Magic", Hancock’s "Rockit" and Weather Report’s "Birdland" as three of the seven tunes. That would be like picking Paul McCartney doing "Till there was you" as representative of the music of the Beatles. Meanwhile a whole wealth of brilliant material from the decade is omitted, including far more stellar representations by Hancock and Weather Report. It may seem hard to believe, but on Burns’ companion CD the following artists don’t make the cut in this Pravdaesque retelling of jazz’s last 40 years: Chick Corea, John McGlaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Oregon, Jaco Pastorius, Joe Henderson, Pat Metheney, Anthony Braxton, Steps Ahead, John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Dave Holland, Jan Garbarek, Lifetime, Dave Liebman, Mike Brecker, Joe Lovano..aww shit, it’s too depressing to go on. And yet, Burns finds time to include Wynton’s vanity project, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra doing a cover of Take The A Train. Paging George Orwell, Mr. Orwell, there’s a package from Mr. Burns and Mr. Marsalis for you at the front desk. George Orwell to the front counter, please.

A couple of friends of mine who are high up in the music biz, having received sneak peeks, say "Hey, lighten up, Mike. I know the last 40 years is bullshit, but what the hell, any publicity is good publicity, don’t ya think?"

No, I’m sorry to say, I don’t think. Jazz is a living, breathing music and in every major city there are serious, hardworking musicians trying to move this music forward. They’ve learned the lessons of the masters well, Louis AND Lieb, Duke AND Diz AND Douglas, Morton AND Mingus AND Mike Brecker AND Melhdau. They will not stand for the museumizing and minstrelizing and misrepresenting of this glorious and ALIVE tradition.

And so we will not go gentle into that good pledge night, Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis. It is in sorrow as much as anger that j’accuse, j’accuse again and again and again, of perpetrating the big jazz lie on the American public. Cause it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got Bill, Chick, Wayne, Mahavishnu, Jaco, Sco, Lieb, Brecker, Zawinul, Joe Hen….

Saxophonist/composer Michael Zilber, described by David Liebman as one of the best musicians of his generation, has recorded several CDs as a leader, his most recent being Two Coasts (IGMOD - 1999), featuring Steve Smith, James Genus, Rodney Holmes and Rachel Z. Having moved out from NYC in 1992, Zilber lives in the Bay Area, where he is active as a leader and sideman, including co-leading a quartet with Steve Smith and directing the CARMA big band, both of which will be releasing new CDs in the coming year. He is Professor of Jazz Studies at Los Medanos College, as well as teaching at The Jazz School and UC/Berkeley.

Visit Bird Lives weekly for web site reviews, our listening suggestions, and a new outrageous Diatribe from the Pariah. Comments/Questions to The Pariah