I’VE LONG BELIEVED more modern-day American citizens would be fans of jazz music if they weren’t so aggressively ordered, from childhood on, that they MUST love it.
You know, that music-appreciation-class bluster about “American Classical Music” or “This Country’s Only Indigenous Art Form.”
That, alas, is the overriding spirit of Ken Burns’s PBS maxi-documentary Jazz, lumbering to its dubious close next Monday. (The last episode being the only one to cover anything done within many of our readers’ lifetimes.)
The whole 18-hour thing is sluggishly laden with the worst didactic balderdash in the stoic narration and the even stoic-er read quotations from old critics (drowning out every single instrumental band and solo segment and even many vocal clips).
Then there’s the structure, the storyline Burns built the show around. It’s all about Great Men (and a few Great Women), American heroes who overcame (for the black musicians) a racist society or (for the white musicians) conformist notions of social respectability. The swirling stew of influences and trends, of commercial thrusts and avant-garde parries, gets muted and confined by the restrictions of a narrative amenable to suburban middle-class parents (i.e., boring as hell to suburban middle-class kids).
One critic even compared Burns, in his pedestrian approach to the topic and his sports-hero depiction of jazz’s greats, to “Bob Costas with an NEA grant.”
But, this being an age when audiovisual entertainments can be as mutable and expansionist as the best jazz has always been, we don’t necessarily need to be stuck with Burns’s work in its current form. We can write in to PBS and demand a deluxe DVD version of the series.
The new on-camera interviews in Jazz are fun, so they could stay in this proposed special edition–as stand-alone clips accessible from the DVD Extras menu.
Similarly, the narrations and quotations should be shunted off to an optional audio track.
That leaves the heart of jazz, and of Jazz–the music itself.
This proposed special edition would contain all the tuneage of the series, with each song played to its full length. (That would require more of the beautiful old-movie footage and historic still photos (did anyone else notice the three-second shot of a Louis Armstrong marquee sign outside Seattle’s Showbox?), but Burns probably has those piled up to his reed hole.)
This version wouldn’t preach at people, especially kids and teens, about how important jazz is.
It would simply let them hear and see for themselves how great it is.
A Final Thought: Jazz, like all the really great American music and culture, had and has just about nothing to do with that stoic-middlebrow PBS-ian (or Ken Burns-ian) voice of mellow authority. Real jazz (like ragtime, western swing, swamp blues, Gospel, rockabilly, R&B, bluegrass, disco, Ramones-era punk, Melle Mel-era hiphop, etc. etc. etc.) is music of cultural mongrelization and cross-pollenization; of life and lust and passion; of pain and loss and joy and the will to go on.
That’s why the music will survive long after dumb TV shows about it have been deservedly forgotten.
NEXT: Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
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