By Michael Zilber

O.K., maybe the stakes aren’t as high as in the Dreyfus affair, and Emile Zola I ain’t (though we share a consonant or two), but to those of us who care passionately about jazz, Ken Burns has committed cultural perjury. Aided and abetted by his svengali, Wynton Marsalis, Burns is fobbing off on the American public "Jazz, a documentary series" that is part hagiography, part-Reaganesque faux-nostalgia and, when it comes to the last 40 years, largely a lie of omission and commission. Let me ask you a question. What would you think of a series on American presidents that spent 18 hours on presidents before Teddy Roosevelt and 2 hours on presidents from TR on? Well, in Jazz, Burns creates essentially the same ratio. He spends 16 hours on the music before 1961 and TWO hours on the music after that. To go back to our presidential analogy, a similarly styled Burns documentary on our leaders would have spent as much time on Grover Cleveland, Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan as on TR, Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton combined. Would YOU think such a series gave a fair representation of presidential history? And what if, within that miniscule two hour segment on everyone from TR to Bill Clinton, Burns asserted that nothing of significance happened after Wilson until the second term of Ronald Reagan! You might think that maybe, just perhaps, some interesting history from FDR through Richard Nixon was left out (so they could fit in more on George Washington, perhaps).

Can I be clear here? Burns has done a tremendous service in some of his early historical footage and background. As with his Civil War and Baseball series, Burns uses a skillful blend of period photographs, source recordings and talking heads to bring a distant period to life. There is no question as to his obvious skill as a filmmaker. If he had made a documentary entitled Jazz Until 1960, I would have had little complaint with him. If he’d entitled his documentary Everything I Didn’t Know About Jazz Until Wynton Told Me, I’d be fine with that, but Burns does a tremendous educational and historical disservice to the music on a level with, say, making a film about the entire civil war that ended with Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in January of 1863.

A little background is in order. Jazz went through an astounding period of ferment, turmoil and upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s, much like the rest of the country. Longstanding precepts were challenged, transformed or simply chucked. Much incandescent music resulted, along with some truly horrible sonic abortions. (As an example of the latter, I believe the fifth circle of Hell is reserved for uninterrupted listenings to Anthony Braxton’s solo double album, For Alto.) The 1970s featured Miles’ ex-sidemen creating a staggering mix of jazz, funk, rock, free and Latin influences in such seminal bands as Weather Report, Mahavishnu, Headhunters, Light as a Feather, Lookout Farm. To paraphrase Marty Kahn, this fierce and brilliant fusion had about as much to do with today’s corporate smooth jazz as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane had to do with Welles’ commercials for Ernest and Julio Gallo.

By the beginning of the 1980s, cultural retrenchment was rampant everywhere, from our pre-senile ex-actor President to Bill Cosby’s politically correct update of Father Knows Best. It was sadly fitting that the decade of unfettered avarice and reaction was brought in by the assassination of John Lennon, only a month and a half before the giddy Gipper took office.

Wynton Marsalis burst on the scene in the early 80s, a young, cocksure trumpet phenom hailing from the cradle of jazz, New Orleans. Filled with brash pyrotechnics, tremendous mimicry skills of those who had come before and an almost unprecedented ability to switch between the classical and jazz worlds, Marsalis took the critical and corporate jazz world by tsunami. Initially, Wynton tilled the fertile fields of mid-60s Miles, with brother Branford doing a credible Wayne Shorter to his brother’s prince of darkness, Kenny Kirkland tearing it up a la Herbie Hancock on the piano and the raging Tain Watts doing a Tony Williams/Elvin/Tain thing. This initial group remains Wynton’s best by far, and it is no accident that the music the band created came before Wynton fell under the influence of two profoundly conservative music critics, Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray.

Stanley Crouch, the David Horowitz of jazz criticism, was initially a fervent apostle of the new free thing. Grandly declaiming David Murray as the next Coltrane, Crouch, a failed FREE jazz drummer (Migod, how do you fail at FREE jazz drumming?), eventually changed his politics somewhere in the mid-80s and began retrenching further and further back into the mists of jazz time. Now Crouch has no truck with music stylistically after…gee, 1960, the time when Ken Burns asserts that jazz lost its way, as stated in the cover copy for his video on 1961-2000. (Is a pattern emerging?)

Crouch’s partner in the education of Eliza Marsalis Doolittle was Albert Murray. A cultural historian specializing in the blues, Murray had superb knowledge of the early blues musicians all the way through the KC territory bands of the late 1930s. Unfortunately, he also developed a powerful formalist ideology wherein jazz was essentially a blues-based music. This is utterly inaccurate as history. I don’t have time to delineate all of the non-blues cultural currents which made up and continue to inform jazz, from Cuba to Europe to Ragtime to Brass bands, so if you want a brilliant and detailed refutation of Murray’s thesis, read Dick Sudhalter’s essay in the NY Times a couple of years back. Suffice it to say, claiming that jazz is essentially a blues-based music is like saying that paella is basically a shrimp dish.

Under the tutelage of Crouch and Murray, Marsalis became increasingly dogmatic that the real jazz was pre-fusion, then pre-modal, then pre-bop, and now Louis Armstrong is about as modern as Wynton likes to venture. Marsalis has become the Ronald Reagan of jazz, and like Reagan, has no memory of those nasty 60s and 70s, preferring to bask in the halcyon days of Roseland, Satchmo and wax recordings. "Well, here we go again."

That is certainly his prerogative, but in his drive to museumize the music, Marsalis has gained some powerful allies and his actions have far-reaching consequences for the art form. He heads Jazz at Lincoln Center, an organization dedicated mainly to repertory of the 1920s-1950s, is by far the most recognized and quoted jazz musician among the mainstream media, and now, through the unholy alliance with Burns, has put his hand into rewriting the history of jazz to expunge all of the advances of the 1960s and 1970s. He and Burns are guilty of historical malpractice.

Burns’ other defense against the charge that he glossed over the last 40 years is that it’s too soon to make a historical judgment on that time. I will grant him that jazzers have not really come to any consensus on the last 20 years. However, ending the series with the deaths of Armstrong and Ellington, is once again false history. As discussed later in this piece, Armstrong’s period of brilliance and innovation was in the late 1920s, and while Ellington remained a powerful and unique compositional force until his passing, nothing he was doing in the 60s and 70s had the influence of his seminal works from the late 20s through the early 40s. There is certainly a consensus view among practicing jazz musicians that Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Mahavishnu, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Dave Liebman, Mike Brecker, Jaco Pastorius, Joe Henderson and Cecil Taylor (just to name a few) profoundly shaped and altered the way the music is played. All of them had far more input during the 60s and 70s into shaping the jazz that is played today than did Burns’ holy duopoly of Ellington and Armstrong.

A last thought on the fatuousness of Burns' assertion regarding whether or not a historical assessment can be made on jazz of the last 40 years: I would submit that if detailed and scholarly works by such as Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin David Halberstam and Anthony Summers can be done on Presidents as recent as Reagan, surely the same could be done with jazz artists from that same time period. Perhaps if Burns had turned to sources other than Marsalis, Crouch and Murray he might have gotten a different perspective on this issue. (I will not name names, but I know for a fact that certain listed advisers on the Burns project are that in name only, since they dissented from the party line as to if or when jazz "lost its way.")

I have a theory about Wynton, based on nothing more than idle speculation. I remember seeing him blaze through town when I was a student at New England Conservatory in 1981. He and I are the same age and I recall being astounded by his trumpet playing with Blakey. Free, cocky and utterly unselfconscious, Marsalis dazzled the room. We all went home buzzing about the young man who had played trumpet with an unparalleled authority and joy – dipping freely into everyone from Clark Terry to mid-60s Miles to Woody Shaw to Freddie Hubbard. We were convinced that anyone who had so brilliantly assimilated all of these styles and more at such a young age would surely, as soon as he found his own voice, reinvent the jazz canon. It was only a matter of time.

By the next time I heard Wynton, five years later at the Village Vanguard, I was deeply immersed in the NYC jazz scene. Playing and gigging with such folks as Wayne Krantz, James Genus, Rachel Z, Rodney Holmes, Drew Gress, Ben Monder, Jimmy Earl, Mark Feldman, Dave Kikoski, Bruce Barth, Ed Schuller and John Riley among others, I had a pretty good sense of what my generation was looking into musically. I eagerly anticipated what Wynton would have to show us. Maybe he would lead the way - shine a light, so to speak. Instead, we were subjected to a stiff, careful and utterly regressive display of neo-conservative soloing starkly at odds with the joyful and unscripted music Marsalis had been delivering only a few years before. Marsalis has continued on his ever more regressive musical journey. At last report, the trumpet terror is channeling Gottschalk and is (according to an NPR feature) seriously advocating going back to the old megaphone style of recording, since it is a more authentic approach than those nasty electronic microphones.

So here’s my theory: Wynton, a truly smart man, with gifted ears and powerful instincts, KNEW that he had nothing new to say, that he was only a brilliant mimic. He was not , to paraphrase Gil Evans, a sound innovator. Knowing this, Wynton, in a position of influence and power unparalleled in jazz, chose to redo the rules of the game. If he couldn’t move the music past the innovations of early 60s Miles, he would reject ALL jazz after that as fraudulent, either cacophonous garbage or cynical commercial sellout. Wynton, as jazz pope of the retro-crowd, released infallible papal bull (in both senses of the word) after papal bull: All electric jazz is cynical commercial pandering. Free jazz is pseudo-intellectual claptrap and so on and so on. Each pronouncement from Marsalis and approving amen from Crouch, Murray, et al. was designed to insulate him from the awful truth: He had nothing new to say in the art form he loved.

Now, through his mouthpiece Burns, he has found an unfettered worldwide audience to spread his big lie about jazz after 1960.

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.

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