Burns was obviously more interested in making political statements than exploring the music. The review below points out that he only had two jazz CDs in his collection when he started work on the documentary. Apparently jazz and Ken Burns Jazz are not the same thing.
Burned
Alex Abramovich on what's wrong with Ken Burns' history of America's music.
KEN BURNS JAZZ -- which consists of a box set, a coffee table book, twenty-odd CDs, and the nineteen-hour documentary concluding its four-week run on PBS this evening -- is so massive a production that everyone can find something to disagree with, and most people have: Its fixation on race distorts musical history. Its grounds for the deification or dismissal of individual musicians are politicized, arbitrary, unfair. It devotes too much space to swing, and slights the past forty years of the music's development. It is too heavily subsidized by corporations and national agencies, compromised by its adherence to a particular interpretation of musical history, compiled by a man who embarked on the enterprise with just two jazz CDs in his record collection. It does seem true that Ken Burns cares less about jazz than about Ken Burns Jazz, and that the two are not one and the same.
Take, for instance, Duke Ellington, who is, along with Louis Armstrong, a central figure in Burns's narrative. Now, you can't praise Ellington highly enough, but it is possible to praise in ways that minimize his actual accomplishments. Thus, while the definitive The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz will tell you it's
Conventionally agreed that he attained the zenith of his creativity in the late 1930s and early 1940s.... Ellington's creativity declined substantially after the mid-1940s, many of the late-period compositions suffering from a diminished originality and hasty work, often occasioned by incessant touring.
The Ellington biography you'll find on the Jazz Web site explains that
In 1943, Ellington inaugurated a series of annual concerts at Carnegie Hall with the premiere of "Black, Brown, and Beige." He continued to expand the scope of his compositions and activities as a bandleader throughout his life. His foreign tours became increasingly frequent and successful; his travel experiences served as the inspiration for his many works about people, places and trains. He wrote nearly two thousand compositions before his death in 1974.
What's interesting about these passages isn't that Burns's description of Ellington's later achievements contradicts conventional wisdom according to Grove. Rather, it's that the passage you'll find on his Web site is actually the very same Grove entry -- with offending passages excised. Burns does Duke no favors in smoothing over the difference between Ellington in his prime and Ellington in decline -- to understand the man's art is, to some extent, to understand just this difference. But Burns, who is quick to admit that his own knowledge of the music is slight (he prefers rock), views jazz as the third installment in his trilogy about race in America. (Baseball and The Civil War came in 1994 and 1990, respectively.) He's less concerned with understanding Ellington's art than Ellington's place in the history of race relations.
And what of it? Burns's tendency to construct a broad historical narrative around a handful of "great men" might lead him to speak in terms the rest of us reserve for padding our résumés. (Ellington wrote two thousand compositions? About people, places, and trains?), but millions of Americans who never heard Ellington in the first place are hearing him now. Jazz slights the last forty years of the music's development? So does most of the record-buying public. One friend suggests that Burns could have deflected ninety percent of the criticisms leveled against the film by calling it Jazz: The First Sixty Years.
Perhaps, but I don't think so. It's said that more Americans get their history from Burns than from any other source, and Burns does jazz such a great service by introducing it to tens of millions of them that specific complaints against him don't carry much weight. Besides, the jazz world is a notoriously riven one, and it's hard to imagine a nineteen-hour film about it that wouldn't draw firestorms of criticism. "Frankly," Burns has said, "I'm not really concerned with the jazz community. I mean, I hope they like it.... But I have to focus most of my attention on reaching that ninety-nine percent for whom jazz is an esoteric, dense, and unapproachable music." But the fact is, the individual criticisms do point towards a single flaw at the core of Ken Burns Jazz, something that accounts not only for his tendency to inflate the reputations of certain artists until it's hard to tell where the art lies, but also for his unwillingness, or inability, to come to terms with latter-day developments in the music. The two tendencies are two sides of a coin, and the coin itself spins counter to values jazz holds most dear.
SEVENTY YEARS AGO, self-styled ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax drove south to "discover" Leadbelly, a physically imposing folk singer who happened to be a convicted murderer. They had Leadbelly chauffeur their car back north, dressed him up in prison stripes for performances, and in their advertising highlighted crimes he'd committed. It didn't matter to the Lomaxes and their audience that Leadbelly was a rather uninteresting musician; what mattered was that he said something interesting about the state of the South.
Burns is more enlightened when it comes to race relations, but his reliance on metonymy -- on using musicians to stand in for movements -- brings the Lomaxes to mind. There's something inherently distasteful in insisting that black artists represent something other than their art, say more than what it's already cost them a great deal to say through music. But the tendency also has the effect of making the music itself a secondary consideration; when art and politics collide, it's art that tends to suffer. And so, jazz the form is reduced to an endless string of incidents and accolades, people and platitudes, while Jazz the film manages to explain what the music means without explaining what it is, or how to listen to it.
To understand why this happens, it helps to understand Burns's relationship to three of the film's most prominent voices -- Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis.
Murray, a close friend of Ralph Ellison's and a celebrated novelist in his own right, has had a lifelong interest in the mythopoetic school of jazz criticism, to which he made a major contribution in 1976 with a history called Stomping the Blues -- a book that is to jazz what Frazer's Golden Bough is to poetry. Like many critics of his generation, Murray is a brilliant generalist: For him, every musician is a "conjuror," every dance a play of "symbolic gestures of purification...inseparable from the fertility ritual." His belief, if one can collapse a philosophy into a sentence, is that the blues forms the backbone of jazz, and he measures the music's authenticity according to how closely it hews to blues patterns. Swing, which Murray celebrates, stands at one remove. bebop is a bit further out, but retains the basic structure. Free jazz, which does away with key signatures, chord progressions, and finally the four-four rhythm that anchors jazz in the blues tradition, is a suspect form, often a flat-out bastardization. Like Burns, Murray seems to value jazz players more for what they had in common (their proximity to the blues) than for what made them unique (what they expressed through their art). "The self-portrait (and/or the personal signature) that emerges from the music of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker," he wrote, "is not primarily a matter of...egotistical self-documentation but rather of the distinction with which they fulfilled inherited roles in the traditional ritual...." For him, as for Burns, Ellington was more than America's greatest composer; he was also its most representative. The first is a critical judgment, the second political, but because Murray is a novelist, and not a critic, the distinction matters little to him. It begins to matter, however, when we begin dealing with individuals rather than movements.
Stanley Crouch came on the scene as a champion of Henry Threadgill and other avant-garde players. A jazz drummer himself, and a gifted polemicist, Crouch made his name with a controversial attack on Toni Morrison's Beloved. The book, he wrote, was "a purple haze of overstatement, of false notes, of strained homilies." Crouch compared Morrison to P.T. Barnum, and argued that her success was due to her appeal as a "representative" black writer. But surprisingly, once the dust settled, Crouch found that he'd drifted into Murray's corner, and his writings on jazz came to reflect Murray's influence. The "great man is my mentor," Crouch wrote, "and far more my father than the fellow whose blood runs in my veins." In the early 1980s, when Wynton Marsalis arrived in New York and found a jazz scene filled with fusion players and jazz-funk experimentalists, he found a kindred spirit in Crouch and Murray. The two did much to shape Marsalis's curatorial impulses, serving as his advisors in the ongoing Jazz at Lincoln Center project -- an immensely successful, and highly controversial, attempt to define the canon of jazz by presenting it in the concert hall, within a context that prizes significance over spirit. It is this canon and this context that we see when we watch Ken Burns's documentary.
Burns has come under attack for swallowing the Murray/Couch/Marsalis interpretation hook, line, and sinker. Given Marsalis's central role in the documentary, Burns's naïveté about the music before embarking on the documentary, and obvious similarities between Ken Burns Jazz and Marsalis's work at Lincoln Center, this seems a damning indictment. But it's also entirely possible that Burns, who always employed the "great man" method of storytelling, simply found a kindred spirit in Marsalis. In any case, I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he complains that "a lot of folks were trying to say that Wynton's got his claws into me, and he doesn't. This is my vision, my appreciation, and it just so happens that Wynton is an impassioned and expert voice that helps articulate the story." Nevertheless, their canons happen to be identical.
JAZZ MAKES THE POINT, and it is a poignant one, that to pick up a horn and step to the microphone is to say "I am" in the face of a racist country that tells that you are not. It is to tell the country, no less than yourself, that you exist, create, and, in the act of expressing yourself, assert the right to express. But the politics of canon building have the unfortunate effect of taking away precisely that right -- the right to say "I am" -- and substituting "we are." It stifles the ability to call things by their given names, to elaborate the shades of meaning, contradiction, and complexity that music draws upon, and which politics smoothe over. It marginalizes the genius of a Thelonious Monk, not because it sees no genius (the brief segment Burns does devote to Monk is full of the kind of praise elsewhere reserved for Armstrong and Ellington), but because that genius refuses to fit any agenda but its own. Burns doesn't slight Monk, as so many critics have argued recently -- he simply doesn't know what to do with him.
Free jazz suffers a similar fate. Just as Burns's canonization of Ellington makes it impossible for him to evaluate the man's artistic achievement in critical terms, his slight of latter-day jazz has less to do with the critical impulse than an inability to fit it into a narrative pattern established long before this project began. "Ornette Coleman came along and said, 'This is free jazz,'" Murray explains in the documentary. "But what is freer than jazz? As soon as you say 'jazz,' you're talking about freedom -- American freedom. So why would anyone want to free it?" On the one hand, one suspects that Murray objects to strains of Jazz that do away with blues structures for reasons he shares with trumpeter Roy Eldridge: "I've listened to it drunk," Eldridge said, "and listened to it sober. And I don't understand it either way." But where Eldridge is honest, Murray is sophisticated: "The whole idea of art is of a form that is a bulwark against entropy or chaos. You can't embrace entropy.... That's like embracing the waves in the sea." This, however, is not criticism -- it's cant. Murray's mythos couldn't have led him, and by extension Burns, to any other conclusion. It is here that their repeated invocations of the jazz "idiom" and its "representative" artists reveal their darker meanings.
That many of jazz's elder statesmen -- John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, even Benny Goodman vibraphonist Lionel Hampton -- did embrace Coleman's music, sitting in with him during his long engagement at the 5 Spot in New York, seems beside the point. What Burns is getting at is that a music that has no reference to anything but itself is antithetical to the greater project of establishing a jazz canon and securing the music's place in American history -- as if that place were ever in doubt. In the process -- in that shift from American music to American music -- the most important, creative, and forward-looking jazz of the sixties takes a back seat to the dwindling (though we mustn't say so!) contributions elder statesmen like Armstrong and Ellington were making during those years. The impression we come away with from watching the last episode of Jazz is that something terribly sad happens to the music once Ellington and Armstrong pass away; it's no longer worthy of taking pride in.
It's here that we run across a complexity, or a conundrum, at the very heart of Jazz: In one sense, politics -- especially the politics of race -- speak to what separates us, while art recognizes commonalities. But politics also speak to the mass, while art reminds us of ways in which we are alone: the tremble of Lady Day's last recordings; the whisper of Miles Davis's trumpet, like love at the world's end. I am grateful for Burns's film, its wonderful archival footage, its wealth of detail and brilliant commentators. But I rue Burns's unwillingness to recognize the complexity inherent in any meeting of art and politics. In the end, I wish he'd trusted a little more in the individual's right to play the right notes, play the wrong notes, or, as Monk did in his last ten years, to play no notes at all.
Alex Abramovich is FEED's Culture Editor
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