A Jazz Postmortem
It seemed sometimes that it would never end?that you could turn on Channel 13 at 4 in the morning and see folks shimmying in an endless lindy-hopping loop. But finally the last episode of Ken Burns' Jazz aired.
It's worthwhile to reiterate the complaints of more sympathetic writers about that last episode: a breakneck romp through the past 40 years in merely two hours just doesn't make sense, especially when juxtaposed with the three and a half hours Burns spent limning 1935-1939 in mind-numbing detail. It's understandable, though, when you realize that jazz, like baseball before it, was in a way a secondary concern for Burns. The series promised to "explore the history of America" through jazz, and this highly questionable goal was perhaps its biggest problem?not that there weren't plenty of others. Pacing for one, and a chronological organization that the filmmakers themselves couldn't stick to consistently. All these structural problems meant that the series lapsed into incoherence at times.
Bad television can be genuinely educational?even entertaining?but it should be called out for what it is. Jazz proves once and for all that Burns gets the pictures first and goes from there?not a bad thing, necessarily, for someone working in television, but a bit of a handicap when documenting a music, even one with more than its share of visual style. All too often the jazz in Jazz was at odds with its pictures and narration. The slow-as-molasses approach, so de rigueur for PBS in general and Burns in particular, simply didn't gibe with speedy, frantic bebop or even "hot" Chicago jazz. To paraphrase a remark attributed to Art Blakey in the next-to-last episode, when you have a fan in danger of nodding off, you're doing something wrong.
Certainly Burns & Co. are capable of editing and synching visuals and music so they reinforce each other and create excitement. They did it well in the segment introducing Kansas City, and the sequence set to Billie Holiday's reading of "Solitude," and the moment when a car rolled down a suburban street at the exact tempo of the Miles Davis tune on the soundtrack. But there were far fewer of these moments and sequences than both subject and viewers deserved, and it's clear that at times the filmmakers became frustrated with the materials available to them. How else to explain the series' tendency to dwell on footage of political events and social trends with little relation to the jazz ostensibly under discussion? These "scene-setting" sequences?of Prohibition enforcement, D-Day, suburbanization, polio?were often crafted with more care, flair and energy than the jazz history they framed.
Ken Burns' Jazz gave Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington pride of place in terms of sheer screen time, and although the series declared that Armstrong "was the most important and influential musician in jazz history," it's quite obvious that his selection as such had less to do with his artistry, magnificent as it was, than with the quality and quantity of his footage, from all those films and television appearances. Burns also had access to some fantastic color "home" films of the Ellington band, and whenever he used it, whether it was Ben Webster drunk off his ass and waving on a balcony or the band playing a game of baseball (very badly), Jazz came alive. The filmmakers needed motion to break up all those stills, and it's remarkable, in retrospect, how obvious were the steps that they took to create it: numerous sequences of moving trains, for example, whenever they could be linked in any way to the story.
Oh yes, the story. Jazz is freedom, don't you know. Jazz is a metaphor for democracy. It's "more important than baseball," as Dave Brubeck says, apparently unprompted. Burns hammered this point home in the episode dealing with World War II, which Time selected as the best of the lot, probably because both that magazine and PBS long for the glory that was ours when we were fighting the Germans. In the midst of interminable combat footage?of the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, the Pacific?Burns outlined the official Nazi position on jazz, which, to put it briefly, was negative. Viewers were then subjected to disturbing footage from Terezin, the "model" concentration camp used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, and Nazi reworkings of popular tunes with new, anti-Semitic lyrics. I guess Burns never heard any of the stories about German lieutenants trading favors for Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford records, or didn't care to repeat them. After all, that would complicate things.
The linkage of jazz with freedom had to be overdetermined in this way because Jazz inadvertently tells quite another story, the one about how black Americans as a group lost interest in jazz as they gained social and political freedoms previously denied them. To put it another way, as the country became more free, jazz declined into irrelevancy at the level of popular culture.
Burns and crew love crowds, which is why they spent so much time in the swing era and with World War II (it's clear that the latter is Burns' next project). That an individual's freedom could be at odds with that of the group isn't an idea Jazz wanted to entertain, let alone explore. From bop on, the great jazz musicians considered themselves artists and essentially demanded that they be treated as such, and inevitably?this is America, remember?a certain kind of alienation grew up between them and the public at large.
Jazz confused artistic freedom and political freedom and suffered from its mistake. Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the proponents of hard bop, are lumped together with soul jazz folks like Jimmy Smith and hailed as heroes for getting jazz records back onto black jukeboxes. But if blues and church music were all it took, Charles Mingus would have been the most popular jazz musician of his time.
The lack of attention Jazz gave to Mingus is probably its most criminal oversight. How it was even possible to construct a two-hour episode, ostensibly covering the years 1956-1960, and not even touch upon Mingus' activities during this time, is almost beyond comprehension. I say almost, because Blakey and his crew did have something that Mingus didn't?that buttoned-down, suited-up, strong and respectable quality that Mingus after a certain point didn't even attempt to pull off, what with his shrink writing the notes to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
Jazz was confused at times about how and why and whether race matters. True, so is everyone else, but it was still an irritant. The series did a good job of showing American racism at its ugliest and most stupid?a frightening still of Miles Davis bloodied and in bandages after being beaten by a policeman, the U.S. government segregating blood supplies by race during World War II, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie being called "boys" as they're presented with their Downbeat awards.
Still, at a certain point the tendency to attribute personal difficulties to race grows tiresome. Ossie Davis spoke of Charlie Parker's "anguish as a man?as a black [his emphasis] man." Miles' rage, destructive to him and others around him, is attributed largely to racism, a little bit to class (Margo Jefferson theorized that his relatively privileged background perhaps made him more vulnerable to racism by creating a sense of entitlement), and not at all to the tension and insecurity of closeted sexuality.
The point is not that Parker didn't experience bitterness and anger due to racism; it's that a jazz musician who used to wear different-colored shoes, listen to country music, discuss the implications of quantum physics and play his saxophone at cows was never going to be John Henry, even absent heroin and prejudice. One of the reasons Jazz's treatment of Armstrong and Ellington was so enjoyable is that their stories aren't even susceptible to the kind of sexual and racial correctness embodied in the John Henry ideal.
To its credit, Ken Burns Jazz didn't shy away from some of the more unsavory aspects of the music and the lifestyle associated with it. The section on heroin was quite graphic, with footage of tying off and shooting up; Miles Davis' former wife Frances Taylor describes how her "prince" assaulted her for saying Quincy Jones was handsome. But the idealizing tendency did come into play. Sonny Rollins, for example, is described as doing manual labor for a year to get and stay off drugs. While this is more or less true, Rollins himself in his recent biography Open Sky gave much of the credit to the government detox facility he attended in Lexington, KY. In Jazz's world, a strong black man like Rollins didn't need help from the government.
The little tics and oddities added up as one watched the series. There was the jarring dissolve from the gates of Auschwitz to a smiling Parker and Gillespie, or the constant attribution of often provocative remarks to "one musician," "another musician" and "a fellow musician." A shot of Los Angeles in the middle of Charlie Parker's life story signaling not Parker's tormented passage in California but a change of topics to the Ellington band. The story about Parker falling through the changes to "Cherokee" in a Harlem chili house, convincingly debunked in Scott Deveaux's 1997 The Birth of Bebop. A picture of Sonny Rollins in full-on 70s style, with an afro and dashiki-style top, in an episode that supposedly ended in 1960. The perplexing decision to profile Clifford Brown directly after a segment on Miles, which only detracted from Brown's achievements. A 5:1 ratio of Gary Giddins to Nat Hentoff when it should have been the other way around.
When Burns came on the screen during pledge time and talked about being a "proselytizer" for jazz, you had to wonder whether he really meant for Jazz. There's no doubt the series reached people of a certain income bracket, what with the rush on Sony's five-CD box set. The question now is whether viewers and consumers will regard the music as history, or turn out to see the non-Burns-trademarked heirs and still-living legends of the tradition.
Here's a prescription for how to increase the audience for jazz: cheap and free concerts instead of Blue Note-style minimums. There've been some of note lately; the Max Roach-Cecil Taylor duo at Columbia, Sonny Rollins last summer at Lincoln Center. When Jazz carped about the Ellington band playing an ice show in (gasp) Flushing, I thought of the time I saw Dizzy Gillespie playing on the athletic field of a Massachusetts high school. Yes, if the musicians are to be paid as they should be for such low-grossing ventures, grant money may have to be involved. Maybe even government money, directly or indirectly?if John Henry can stomach it, and if our government were so inclined.
Jazz was what they call a television event. Sometimes films and tv do have a large effect out in the real world, and sometimes they don't. For more on jazz, check back in a year or two.