In defense of "Jazz"

Hipster critics say Ken Burns offered up only penny-ante sociology and sops to Wynton Marsalis. They're wrong.

By Gary Kamiya

Feb 7, 2001 | Long before "Jazz" hit the air, you could hear the grumbling. And once Ken Burns' 10-episode, 16-hour behemoth began its broadcast run, the dissing was all over the place -- in letters to the New York Times, on jazz sites on the Internet, in the Atlantic, in the New York Review of Books.

"Jazz" was penny-ante sociology. It rolled over for Wynton Marsalis. It bought into the Albert Murray-Stanley Crouch party line. It deified Louis Armstrong. It presented legends as historical fact. It didn't cover contemporary jazz. It misrepresented Duke Ellington's compositional process. It shorted Latin jazz. It was anti-Semitic. It was racist. It didn't give Charles Mingus (Sonny Stitt, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Sun Ra, etc., etc.) his due. And so on.

Some of this criticism was legitimate -- Francis Davis' tough but fair appraisal in the Atlantic stands out -- and most of it was more or less understandable. A bit of irritation could be expected at the genuflecting proclamations that announced the latest white-horse arrival of St. Ken, the documentary apostle of Big Serious Subjects who, armed with a list of corporate sponsors as long as a Cecil Taylor solo, was going to do for jazz what he had done for the Civil War.

And in any case, the naysaying hardly represented the majority opinion on "Jazz" -- most of the mainstream reviews were favorable, and many of them were glowing.

Still, much of the caviling left the distinct impression that people who really knew jazz hated the show, and only neophytes or casual fans could be expected to like it. Well, as a jazz fan for 30 years, I have to say that I loved "Jazz." It isn't a masterpiece, but it's an exceptionally fine documentary about one of the great American subjects. It's hugely informative, well crafted and often moving -- and even if you don't agree with all of its occasional grand pronouncements, they're basically harmless.

And "Jazz" also manages to achieve a few moments of genuine artistic transcendence, moments in which its formal elements -- music, photography and narrative -- inform each other in a strikingly original way. Oddly, the form that ends up on top of the aesthetic mountain isn't necessarily music -- it's photography. There were moments, watching "Jazz," when I felt that I was seeing photographs deeper, with a clearer, more fatalistic eye, than I ever had before.

The actual experience of listening to the music in "Jazz" is odd. It's framed: The photographs and the narration give it an aura, a whiff of something beyond itself. There's something artificial, falsely elevated, about all grand narratives about art, just as there's something faintly suspicious about the aura that paintings acquire when they're hung in a gallery. Listening to it on "Jazz," the music ceases to be merely what it is -- a matter of fingers and timing and sweat and intuition, a very specific mastery of craft -- and goes aloft, floating above the world like a sublime soundtrack of the American soul. Or something.

Paradoxically, this very sublimity is inseparable from the music's secondary role. Duke Ellington's "Satin Doll" becomes the illustration of a certain ineffable sophistication, Bird's "Koko" a metaphor for artistic integrity in the face of personal dissolution, John Coltrane's "Chasin' the Trane" a signifier of sheer, tortured intensity. This is not exactly what we heard when we heard the music in clubs, or on records. Then they were just tunes. Magnificent tunes maybe, major works of art perhaps -- but not meaningful.

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