FYI (for those who haven't seen it)

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Posted By: Keith O'Leary

Not sure if its on everywhere, but tonight on PBS here at 9:00 is Ken Burns documentary on Jack Johnson called Unforgivable Blackness.

http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness

If you haven't seen it, you should. For anyone that doesn't know who Ken Burns is, his efforts are always first rate and always include plenty of vintage film footage. Hes the one that did the 12 hour PBS documentary on the Civil War as well as Baseball.

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Posted By: Jon & Jennifer

Saw it...and LOVED it. Highly recommend it as well!

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Posted By: barrysloate

Don't forget his 19 hour documentary on jazz- loved it as much as baseball, maybe more.

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Posted By: andy becker

very good show. two parts, if i remember. would highly recommend also. you do not need to be a big boxing fan to enjoy.

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Posted By: DJ

Being a gigantic fan of Jazz, Baseball, Jack Johnson and the Civil War, Ken Burns can do no wrong with me.

IMO, the Jazz one was brilliant and the best. Even if you don't know anything about Jack Johnson outside of the fact that he was a pugilist, your eyes will open and you will be intrigued.

DJ

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Posted By: BcD

that is Blaspheme!

Baseball is the very first thing mentioned in the Bible~

" In the Big In-ning "

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Posted By: JimB

While I am a big Ken Burns fan in general and a huge Jazz fan, I must say that the Jazz documentary left me a little dry. I thought he covered the origins up through the 40's and the advent of bebop well, but that he really dropped the ball at that point. I think because Wynton Marsalis was his primary informant and he is both musically very conservative and a rival/jealous son of Miles Davis' that Miles did not get nearly the attention he deserved. But a bigger complaint would be that he completely dropped the ball on the avant garde and free jazz stuff beginning in the late '50s with folks like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and moving through the 60's with everyone from Alber Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roland Kirk, to late period Coltrane, etc. Anthony Braxton got almost no mention. When he did mention Coltrane's late experiments into the avant-garde, they played music off his earlier transitional album, Impressions, in the background, but not the ground-breaking work off Assension or Live in Japan. In a sense I blame Wynton Marsalis for this as much as Burns because he probably utterly ignored this stuff in his conservatism. Burns admitted he was no jazz expert and relied on informants. One would think jazz ended with Duke Ellington or maybe Charlie Parker if you listen to Marsallis. There has been so much great new jazz in the last 35 years and it would have been nice if he had acknowledged it since it was simply called, "Jazz" and not "Jazz Beginnings". Most of the coverage of the '60s had to do with Ellington's late material and not aforementioned groundbreakers.

Don't get me wrong, I love Ellington, Basie, and a lot of the old swing and big band stuff as well. And I thought Burns did a great job on that stuff. The sins were more sins of omission.

Sorry for the OT rant. Jazz is close to my heart.
JimB

P.S. All of Burns' documentaries are about race in America, which I think is great. He raises the discussion in ways that do not make people too defensive.


edited for spelling

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Posted By: barrysloate

Jim- Ken Burns could have spent more time on Miles but at least he recognized him for the genius that he was. I agree once he passed the 1960's the show got really weak but that is partly due to jazz being past its heyday by 1970. He didn't even mention Weather Report, and they were mostly Miles' sidemen. But hey, nobody has tried such an ambitious project before and I thought he handled bop and the fifties especially well.

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Posted By: JimB

Barry,
I agree that it was a hugely ambitious project and I am glad he did it. And what he did cover, he did brilliantly. It was mostly what he omitted that bothered me. Perhaps this was meant to be an introduction to jazz for most Americans and dwelling too much on the avant-garde would turn people away. It's just that I think those are some of the most important contributions to the canon of American music and should not be ignored, especially in a documentary on jazz.

I understand what you are saying when you say that jazz had passed its heyday by 1970, but there has been some amazing jazz since that time. I wonder if that general perception that -jazz is over- is so prevalent because mainline discussions of it always end there. What about Anthony Braxton or David S. Ware or any of a number of others?

JimB

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Posted By: Bruce Babcock

I agree with Jim's comments but also with Barry's. I have not been as interested in jazz since the 1970s, and I picked the college I went to based on their jazz program at the time. I was luck enough to know and work with J.J.Johnson (the Josh Gibson of the trombone, and arguably the greatest trombonist of the 20th century). Nowdays, pop music in all its forms has overwhelmed the market place, to the detriment of most other types of music. Wynton Marsalis is doing his bit to keep the legacy alive, and is very involved in helping the musicians who lives were turned upside down by Katrina. But the economics of the jazz life, always difficult, are now almost impossible.

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Posted By: Bob Rousseau

I also felt the "Jazz" documentary paled compared to the baseball. I thought it was because (from what I seem to remember) Burns was much more of a longtime baseball fan, but he didn't start paying attention to jazz til sometime before working on that documentary, hence he relied more on Wynton Marsalis to tell the tale. There was more of a variety of historians in the "Baseball" documentary, I seem to remember. Also, another part of what made the Baseball docu so enjoyable was not just the factual, but was hearing those writers talk about how much baseball meant to them from the time they were kids (Robert Creamer saying things like going to see Ruth play as a little boy and Ruth having swung around on his heels and facing the general area Creamer was, and Creamer thinking "Babe Ruth is looking at ME!"; Shelby Foote talking about his uncle Roy taking he and his cousin Roy to the hotel where the Yankees were staying during the 30s- and going on up to say hello. Those stories were magical (and then of course, you had Buck O'Neill who added so much and then those other few Negro Leaguers to tell more of what they actually experienced. Wynton Marsalis is so young, he didn't have the same kind of stories to tell, and what are you going to do, get someone to say "I took "Kind of Blue" out of the record jacket and just sat back and marveled"...not quite as palpable as someone going out to a ball field and actually watching someone in motion. Those anecdotes really put faces on being a fan, and made it easier to relate to. I haven't seen "Jazz" since it was on TV, but as I recall, there was precious little of that. In a way, I also felt that Burns had already told alot of the story of 20th century America in "Baseball" and consequently, there was less to tell, or it was more repetitious in "Jazz".

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Posted By: barrysloate

I think there are many technically proficient musicians today but the music is lacking the freshness of the ground breakers of the 40's and 50's- Bird, Monk, Miles, Mingus, etc. Every artform has its golden age and if you are a fan of rock music no other period holds a candle to the years 1964-69. That was rock's golden age and jazz will always have great players but may no longer have great ideas.
Of course Ken Burns left things out and I would have preferred to see more about the great music of the fifties and a little less on the thirties (no harm meant to Duke and Louis) but I guess everyone has their personal preferences and in the end it was the greatest documentary on jazz there has ever been.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Bruce- J.J. Johnson was the greatest modern trombone player, and in fact there really aren't that many others you could rattle off. I loved Jack Teagarden and he and Louis together were priceless but that is an earlier era. Pretty cool that you got to work with him.

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Posted By: JimB

Wow Bruce! How fortunate you were to know and study with J.J. Johnson. He was the best, without a doubt. I love the albums he did with Kai Winding as well. Baseball and jazz and a few other things are the stuff that make me patriotic.
JimB

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Posted By: JimB

Bruce,
When I was in grad school (in Asian philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davis was one of the jazz profs in the music dept. He is famous of course for his inimitable style of playing and played with such greats as Miles Davis, etc. Anyway, once a year he would teach a History of Jazz course. I always wanted to take the course, but he would not allow people to just audit; they had to write the papers and take the tests, etc. Unfortunately I always convinced myself that I was too busy with the graduate work I was there for and didn't have the time. It is one of my great regrets. A roommate of mine took the course and said it was spectacular, complete with numerous personal anecdotes. Oh well.
JimB

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Posted By: Mark Rios

I met Burns in Manhattan right after the release of the Johnson
documentary - I approached him with my pregnent wife, at the time - he seemed pretty sour.


Mark

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Posted By: Scott Gross

Johnson's boxing cards have hardly come back down in price since the original showing (although the Braddocks have since Cinderalla Man ).

Since we're OT here, it was a great documentary on Johnson's personal life (which, in many ways, was more interesting than ring life). But Burns did jump on the old Johnson/Ketchel fight saga ==> Exhibition ==> Ketchel double crossed Johnson ==> Johnson gets mad ==> knock out Ketchel ==> pulls Ketchel's teeth out of glove, etc.

Pure "sports ledgend" (like Ruth calling his shot, etc.).

Fight was real: Ketchel was middle weight champ. Johnson had beat all others of interest. Back then middle weights fought light heavy and heavy quite often. It was a perfect, big time, match.

If it was an Exhibition, why was Ketchel knocked out cold in 2nd round (only saved by bell). Can't sell too many beers in a two round exhibition.

All acounts have Ketchel beating Johnson in 7-8-9th rounds. If Johnson was fed up with "exhibition" why didn't he knock Ketchel out then ???

In the final round, Johnson is in a complete boxing defensive stance, when Ketchel lands knock out blow. No cheap shot on an unexpecting opponent.

It was Ketchel's desparate lunge at Johnson that gave Johnson a wide open shot to knock Ketchel out. Ketchel knew he had to come back hard when Johnson got up.

During and after Ketchel was knocked out, Johnson is plainly seen standing with hands on ropes. Not picking anything from gloves.

Sorry, ramble of the day ................

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Posted By: barrysloate

In the late 1970's the New School for Social Research in Manhattan had a class entitled Jazz on Film. David Chertok, who was to jazz film collecting what Barry Halper was to baseball, shared his films with his students. I have never had a better jazz education in my life than the few years during which I saw his collection of jazz performances on film. Simply eyeopening. David was a friend and although he passed away, I know his archive was an important resource for Ken Burns.

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Posted By: warshawlaw

The documentary only enhances the public perception and appreciation of him as a true pioneer. Did they mention (I did not see the documentary; PBS had some other crap on yesterday) that Johnson and Joe Choynski did time together in Texas after their 1904 interracial boxing match and that Choynski spent the incarceration time with Johnson boxing with him and effectively schooling the much younger man in the subtleties of fighting? Choynski was the only man to KO Johnson prior to Willard.

Scott is right on the nose about the Ketchel fight. There were only 3 weight divisions (light, middle and heavy) and Bob Fitzsimmons had been the first to hold both at the same time because he hit like a mule but was very thin and could make the 165# limit. Ketchel likewise hit like a mule and had a puncher's chance at beating Johnson. Johnson may have taken the fight lightly at first, but he was clearly knocked down and just as clearly came off the canvas to knock out Ketchel. I also have to wonder whether there would have been a rematch at some point had Ketchel not been murdered.