Not too long ago my wife and I finally got around to finishing watching Ken Burns’s documentary series, Jazz. It only took us ten years. Thank goodness for Netflix streaming! We streamed the entire series to our TV via our Roku device and were able to watch it on our schedule without needing to remember to tape it or have it take up space on a DVR or checking it out of a library. The convenience of it all encouraged us to watch this truly monumental series.
If you haven’t seen it and you’re interested in music, history, show business, personalities, or American sociology, I’d recommend it highly. It’s in the expected Burns format: a narrated collection of still photographs, old film footage, some television kinescopes and videotape sections, and testimony from historians, promoters, and jazz musicians, skillfully arranged to tell a story. And this brings me to the point I wanted to make about Jazz.
Ken Burns is a storyteller and a homilist, not a journalist. Jazz is a story, not an encyclopedia. Burns made choices in selecting the material to facilitate telling the story he wanted to tell. He concentrates on trumpet and saxophone players, a handful of vocalists, composers, arrangers, and band leaders. But that’s not the whole story of jazz.
In doing so he largely passes over the entire rhythm section. It’s possible to have a jazz band without a trumpet player or saxophonist. It’s possible to have a jazz band that consists solely of a rhythm section. A jazz band without a rhythm section, even if it consists just of a piano, a string bass, or a drum set is practically inconceivable.
Other stories can be told about jazz than the one that Burns elected to tell. For example, jazz can be thought of as the story of a life: Louis Armstrong’s life. Jazz began around the time he was born and it died when he did. This particular story has the advantage of providing a definition of jazz, something that the Burns documentary can’t do. Jazz is what Armstrong played. If Armstrong didn’t play it, it might have been good, beautiful, virtuosic, and important, but it wasn’t jazz.
Seventy years is a good, long run for a musical style. It’s longer than bel canto or verismo lasted in opera and it’s longer than the Romantic style of Beethoven and Brahms in classical music.
I’m not precisely complaining about the emphasis placed on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holliday. Telling the story of jazz without mentioning Armstrong would be as inconceivable as telling the story of baseball without mentioning Babe Ruth. Ellington is probably the most important and enduring composer to come out of jazz, Charlie Parker (along with Armstrong) the greatest virtuoso, and Billie Holliday by many people’s reckoning the greatest vocalist. However, Fats Waller sold as much sheet music and as many records in the 30s as Ellington and Ethel Waters sold more records than Billie Holliday did. They’re barely footnotes.
If, in the heyday of jazz during the 1930s and 40s, you had stopped a random passer-by and asked him or her to name ten jazz musicians, the odds are pretty good that nine of the ten named would have been white. There have been many important and accomplished white jazz musicians. You would not receive that impression from Jazz. I note, in passing, that although the words “Hoagy Carmichael” do not occur in Jazz, his importance as a composer of jazz standards can hardly be overestimated, and he sold a heckuva lot of sheet music and records.
The ASCAP strike in the 40s, its effect on popular music (jazz was the popular music of the 1940s), and the rise of Latin jazz that resulted is completely unmentioned.
The focus on jazz as an African-American phenomenon results, I think, in a misunderstanding of the nature of jazz. In my view jazz is a conversation. It’s a conversation among black musicians, among and between black and white musicians (particularly, in the early days, white Jewish musicians), and among and between musicians who are self-taught and classically-trained musicians. De-emphasizing this conversational aspect of jazz in favor of great virtuosos necessarily emphasizes the very phenomenon of self-indulgent virtuosity for its own sake decried at one point in the documentary by Branford Marsalis as a perversion of jazz, not jazz.
My foregoing comments notwithstanding I recommend Jazz wholeheartedly. If you have any of the interests mentioned in the second paragraph of this post you’ll enjoy it and are likely to learn something. If you don’t have any of those interests, there are plenty of reality shows.
It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but my recollection was that it was of the same piece of cloth as Burns’ Baseball — American exceptionalism with a focus on the classic pantheon. In baseball it was a studied focus on the Yankees, instead of the New Orleans to New York pantheon.
Interesting pick-up on Branford Marsalis. His brother, Wynton, co-produced Jazz and prior to this special had a PBS series on Jazz that presented pretty much the same arch of history without the pretty pictures and choreography of Burns, but it had demonstrations of how jazz was played, including full orchestra. Recommended.
Anyway, I wonder if Branford, who seems to enjoy playing jazz far more than talking about it, got a zing in at his brother there.
I saw Elvin Jones at Reed, about 1975. I also used to see jazz in Dallas, about 1980. Good saxophone gave way to disco and whatever they call the crap popular music my sons have listened to the last ten years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4uvN0tTlvo
You forget the great jazz guitarists. Christian, Montgomery, Pass, Ellis, Reinhardt, etc. You probably do not get to rock and roll w/o these guys.
Steve
Guitar is a rhythm section instrument. My remark about the documentary’s generally ignoring the rhythm section didn’t just mean drums but included guitar. IIRC the only guitarist mentioned in the documentary was Django Reinhardt and that only in passing.
Jazz organ, another rhythm section instrument, wasn’t mentioned at all. String bass barely mentioned. Other rhythm section instruments like banjo and tuba were completely ignored. BTW, I thought that the documentary’s failure to mention the French brass band tradition was a significant omission.
On the race issue, I don’t know where it comes from. Several months ago you posted on the “Cry of Jazz,” which is a jazz documentary from ’59 that claims only African-Americans can make jazz, because it’s source is the black experience. I think it also implies that once african-americans are assimilated into American experience jazz will die.
I’ve got a few recording guidebooks from Blackwell publishing that specifically ban white musicians from being included as blues and jazz artists with accompanying essays. Amusingly, the chapter in the Blues book on Louisiana, includes numerous whites. I suppose when the editors got the chapter from the author, they didn’t have any easy way to figure out what race any of these people were. Blackwell was a European publishing house and my sense is that Europeans stroke this narrative.
Anyway the racial angle seems anachronistic, I kind of like the anachronistic. I’m not sure there is much recorded jazz I’ve liked since ’67. I primarily like Armstrong, Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Rollins. For performance, I like the New Orleans second line performers like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Kermit Ruffins’ bands. These bands play the standards, focus on moments of improvisation — even the rhythm section gets to improv, even the tuba.
Indeed it was a fascinating piece, although I was also struck by the lack of rhythm section players, and also the emphasis on the pre-early 40’s, although I understand the historical reasons.
But for someone more interested in 40 and into 50’s jazz (Miles Davis, John Coltrane etc) it would have been nice (maybe it will be Jazz II) to have some treatment of that era.
A couple parting thoughts. The death of my favorite jazz style coincides when Miles Davis went off the rails (think Bitches Brew). However you can find interesting more modern styles (and lay waist to the “blacks only” thing – eg what about the great pianist Bill Evans?). I would offer up one for the motivated: “Jazz at the Pawnshop” Prophone PRCD 7778. Recorded by Arne Domnerus, Bengt Hallberg, Georg Riedel and Egil Johansen they are decidedly not black.
And steve, not sure where you are coming from on the jazz guitarist inspiring rock guitarists. The chords and sequences are mostly different. Rock has its roots in blues chord construction, and perhaps some country, and guys like Big Bill Broonzy, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and of course Robert Johnson are the guys cited as the developers of the rock and roll guitar style.
Fair point Drew, probably reflecting my own bias from my playing days (still own a pre-CBS Telecaster). The blues greats are the direct influence, but I think there was a fair amount of inspiration from the two groups into both genres. Listen to Hendrix and his chords.
Steve
As my seven year old points out, jazz has horns, rock ‘n roll has guitars. Sad, but largely true these days.
I agree with PD that Burns sees everything through the prisim of race in Jazz and in Baseball. It was a habit he picked up in The Civil War and he’s having trouble breaking it. Generally it hasn’t hurt Jazz or the first half of Baseball, but the second half of Baseball is deeply flawed. The STORY of baseball in the 20th century is the growth/influence of the game outside the United States. However, that doesn’t fit into Burns’ pre-existing mindset so he largely misses the story.
I knew a lot less about Jazz going into the film, so its problems might be less apparent to me. I did notice that bthe things I knew a little about (such as Dave Brubeck) were barely mentioned…still I just chalked that up to my relative ignorance.