FYI (for those who haven't seen it)

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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