Jazz: A Film by Ken Burbs. Film/Video documentary. Director: Ken Burns; Producers: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick; Written by Geoffrey C. Ward; Narrated by Keith David; Cinematography by Buddy Squires and Ken Burns. Distributed by PBS. 10 one-hour episodes, 2001. Additional description at http://www.newsreel.org/films/kpfa.htm.

Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns.

Capturing the spirit of a highly improvisational music on film is a steep challenge-much more difficult, arguably, than the routine business of preserving it on recording. Only a few documentaries-most notably Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) and A Great Day in Harlem (1994)-have been inventive and light-footed enough to convey something of the music's enormous playfulness and wit. Ken Burns's Jazz takes a more conventional route by enveloping its subject in an air of solemn ritual, as if thereby to justify the size and scope of the project.

The decision to place jazz on a pedestal affects historical interpretation at a very basic level. Jazz is treated from the outset not as a lively form of vernacular entertainment but rather as something more impressive and enduring-in a word, Art. Early in the film-well before Louis Armstrong's achievements are discussed, and before the name of Buddy Bolden, prototypical "first man of jazz," is even mentioned-the critic Gary Giddins informs us that jazz is "unlike all of the other folk musics of the world" in that it "blossoms into an authentic art." [CLIP: Episode 1, just before "The Big Noise"] What exactly is "authentic art," one might wonder? And how did jazz alone of all "folk musics" manage to achieve this exalted status? Such statements may provoke questions in the mind of the attentive viewer, but in the film they are simply asserted. The purpose of the hyperbole seems to be to suggest that jazz, like all High Art, springs from the unknowable workings of inner aesthetic necessity and idiosyncratic genius rather than from any concrete historical context.

Yet this is by no means the only strategy by which jazz is justified as vitally important. The idea of jazz-as-art, although central to the film's raison-d'�tre, is ultimately overshadowed by the constant assertion that jazz "reflects" (or, in filmic terms, is a "soundtrack" to) broader currents in American history. Throughout its ten episodes, Burns and his collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward (author of A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt) take pains to situate the music within the march of historical events in America from turn-of-the-century New Orleans to the turbulent 1960s. This openly, even aggressively historicist approach is the aspect of the documentary that is most likely to be remembered by its audience, if only because the link between music and history is continually reinforced by striking visual images. Of course, this is also the aspect most likely to be of use to professional historians.

As with virtually any film, the sonic backdrop in Jazz adds an invisible but powerful emotional dimension to the visuals in the foreground. As a result, even the most familiar images can take on new meanings. In Jazz, photographs of soup lines in the Depression are joined to the plangent sound of Bessie Smith singing "Poor Man Blues." Newsreels of brutalized Civil Rights protesters are juxtaposed with Abbey Lincoln's screaming vocals from Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Combat footage in the South Pacific in World War II is synchronized with the rousing sound of Gene Krupa's "Drum Boogie." In this last case, skillful editing implicitly suggests a link between the mechanized violence of war and the energetic, stylized violence of swing music. [CLIP: Episode 7, "Soldiers of Music"]

In each case, the traffic of meaning flows both ways. Not only does music help to make the past more vivid, but the imagery also deepens our experience and understanding of the music in ways that are both obvious and subtle. One of Burns's favorite technique is to pan across or zoom into a still photograph, moving from the anonymity of crowds to individual faces that look out of the past at us, their expressions ranging from unnerving frankness to uninhibited ecstasy. Through these devices, the film helps supply the human element often absent from our experience of recordings, as well as introducing explicit emotional expression to a music that may strike novice listeners as impenetrably abstract.

Despite the ostensible focus on music, only on rare occasions is a musical performance offered as an object of contemplation in its own right. One such moment comes at the end of Episode 3, when Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" (1928) is heard as a set piece, uninterrupted by voice-over commentary. Before the music begins, we are told, with typical rhetorical piling-on, that "West End Blues" is both a masterpiece of autonomous art ("the most perfect three minutes in music") and "a perfect reflection of the country in the moments before the Great Depression." (One has to wonder: if this tune had been recorded just a few years later, when the Depression was at its nadir, would it necessarily have sounded all that different?). What follows is an imaginative and evocative music video: Armstrong's music combined with series of images, ranging from urban street scenes to a final, dramatic silhouette of a man plowing a field. [CLIP Episode 3, concluding sequence: West End Blues]

More typical of the way music is used is the treatment of Fats Waller's solo piano showcase "Handful of Keys" (1929) in Episode 4. We hear only about twenty seconds of music before the narration takes over-saturated, as usual, with hyperbole. (Waller may have been "the most popular man in Harlem" and was certainly "a brilliant pianist and an electrifying entertainer"; but "a gift for songwriting few musicians would ever match"--? Surely Waller's song catalogue was insignificant compared with those of Gershwin, Kern, or other contemporaneous giants of Tin Pan Alley.) From this point on, the music runs continuously, serving not only as audible demonstration of Waller's pianistic gifts, but also-and perhaps more importantly-as the connective tissue in an extended photo montage. To this latter end, the music is chopped up and reassembled so that it ends up running a full minute beyond its original length. While the editing is relatively unobtrusive and often skillfully coordinated with the narration (so that an observation about his "melodic, irrepressible" right hand technique coincides neatly with an particularly delightful passage), the overall approach is less respectful to Waller's music than one might expect. It certainly is a jarring experience for anyone familiar with the original recording. [CLIP: Episode 4, just before "Hard Times"]

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In a less atmospheric sense: how are history and music understood to interrelate? A central metaphor in Jazz links the music to democracy. Jazz in this view offers a way of imagining a fully realized American democracy: "a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself," in the words of Wynton Marsalis, chief among the on-camera interviewees in the film; or, as Gerald Early puts it, "a lyricism about the great American promise, and our inability to live up to it in some ways." Significantly, jazz is also offered as the means by which America might achieve this promise. "The real power and the innovation of jazz," argues Marsalis in the film's opening moments, "is that a group of people can come together and create art-improvised art-and can negotiate their agendas with each other."

The obvious subtext for these and similar comments is race. Race, of course, served as the center of gravity for Burns's previous multi-episode epics. In Jazz, it is if anything even more central. Slavery may have been the overriding moral issue for The Civil War, but that conflict nevertheless pitted white Americans against each other. In Baseball, the poignant story of the Negro Leagues was that of highly-skilled players unfairly denied the opportunity to compete, but in a game not of their own invention. Jazz, by contrast, is presented from the outset as a distinctive creation of African-American culture. The singular irony we are invited to contemplate throughout the film is that a democratic art could be created by (in Gerald Early's words) "a people who have a historical consciousness of being unfree in a free country."

Of course, to characterize jazz as a "black music" is to invite controversy. On the one hand, no one denies that the musical resources of jazz draw heavily on African-American folk traditions, or that its major innovators, from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, have been black. On the other hand, there has never been anything exclusively black about jazz. White Americans have always had a powerful hand in shaping the music, whether as enthusiastic paying audiences or as expert practitioners. Nor, for that matter, has there been anything exclusively American about jazz, with both musicians and recordings spreading the musical style around the world almost from the beginning. In restricting the focus to the United States and privileging the experiences and achievements of African Americans in particular, Burns and Ward have made a conscious choice. Their aim is to use the story of jazz as a way of exploring how American cultural identity is formed, with an upbeat emphasis on what Burns has called the "redemptive future promise of America" [Jon Pult, "Backtalk with Ken Burns," OffBeat: New Orleans' and Louisiana's Music Magazine March 9-13 www.offbeat.com/ob2005/backtalk.html]. Jazz is an art through which black Americans can express their full humanity, and by means of which white Americans can learn to transcend the poisonous heritage of racism. Nothing in Jazz exemplifies this point better than the story of a white teenager whose life was transformed by hearing Louis Armstrong in Texas in 1931. Galvanized by the wholly unexpected experience of "seeing genius in a black man," that teenager-Charles L. Black-embarked on a legal career that culminated with his role on the litigation team that argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. [CLIP: Episode 4, "Mr. Armstrong"]

The film's treatment of race is thus a delicate balancing act. Jazz is presented, through biography and social history, as distinctively African-American. But any sense of ethnic exclusivity is explicitly denied. Jazz is everybody's music. Some (Amiri Baraka-not one of the on-camera interviewees, incidentally-comes to mind) would undoubtedly find this approach both unsurprising, given the heavy corporate sponsorship, and highly unwelcome: the inevitable expropriation of black culture by the white mainstream in the name of a higher, color-neutral, Americanism. In Jazz, this process is presented as wholly benign. As the title to Episode 4 puts it, jazz offers to all of America "The True Welcome"-a point underscored by being voiced on-camera by African Americans such as the critic Stanley Crouch or the actor Ossie Davis. As Davis explains: "The very nature of jazz is to proclaim to all the world�.put race aside. Come in, open your heart, open your mind�.Be a part of this." [CLIP: Episode 4, just before Fats Waller sequence].

In light of this generosity, white musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Dave Brubeck, all of whom receive an ample share of air-time, appear not as interlopers or exploiters but as good-hearted Americans who refused to let racial boundaries keep them from the music they loved On the whole, this is both accurate and fair. Few white jazz musicians were personally racist, and none deserve to be held up as symbols of the racism that pervaded society as a whole. Not even the infamous assertion by Nick LaRocca, a member of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, that jazz was "an exclusively white creation"-a statement that stuns the normally voluble Wynton Marsalis into a remarkable 14-second on-camera pause in the opening episode-can dispel the overall impression of racial harmony within the musicians' community.

Still, the focus is clearly on black musicians-in particular, on the heroic stories of Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974), whose lengthy careers help to tie the film together as a whole. The disproportionate emphasis on these two towering (and telegenic) figures is one of the most striking features of the film. It has its apparent justification in the idea that the abstraction "jazz" is more easily comprehended when presented as the lived experience of a handful of compelling personalities. As Ward has admitted: "I think history is biography�.That may be a failing on my part, but I can't get interested in history unless I read about people doing things. And film is a storytelling medium. So we deliberately looked for those whose lives stretched the longest and could tell the story of jazz best." [Howard Reich, "The Heat's On Burns's 'Jazz'," Chicago Tribune 26 November 2000] Given this strategy, Ellington and Armstrong were certainly the obvious choices. The implicit monumentalizing of a handful of "Great Men" may seem at odds with Burns's usual commitment to history as told "from below," but even figures of this magnitude in jazz tend to suffer from neglect-while each was a celebrity in his own right, no one could say with a straight face that television programming has been saturated with accurate information about either of them. In particular, Jazz seems devoted to raising the cultural status of Armstrong, known to the general public less as the founding figure of a major artistic tradition than as a charismatic, if somewhat vulgar, entertainer of yesteryear. In many ways, the film's relentless focus on Armstrong represents the culmination of a rehabilitative process begun by Gary Giddins, who had argued in his 1988 biography Satchmo that "Armstrong was an artist who happened to be an entertainer, an entertainer who happened to be an artist-as much an original in one role as the other" [32]. On camera, Giddins continues to press his case with characteristic energy: Armstrong is no less than "America's Bach, Dante, [and] Shakespeare," but his music was perfectly congruent with both the democratic ethos and the exigencies of mass entertainment: "[He] wasn't offering his art as Homer-it wasn't for four credits, it was for fun." (Whether Homer-who, like Armstrong was an oral poet-thought of his own art as academic is another question altogether. The imprecision of the analogy, however, is typical of the film's tendency to substitute off-the-cuff observations for considered insight.)

Ellington's case is less urgent, but made with no less insistence. Unsurprisingly, Ellington is repeatedly touted as "America's greatest composer"-without, unfortunately, contextualizing this claim within the struggle by other composers such as Ives, Gershwin, or Copland to develop a distinctively American aesthetic in concert music. (Only racial prejudice, after all, kept Ellington from being seen as their peers in this effort during his lifetime.) More important, Ellington is presented as the exemplar of a particular response to the black experience in America that, in Gary Giddins's assessment, bypasses "protest�irony, and bitterness" in favor of "a sense of wonder, of delight, and tremendous pride." (Ossie Davis makes a similar on-camera assessment of Ella Fitzgerald: "Ella looks at America, and in spite of poverty, pain, segregation, lynching statistics, Ella sings and her soul is full of joy.") The continual pairing of Ellington with Armstrong in the film is both intentional and revealing. Ellington, the handsome, dignified, light-skinned product of Washington's intensely proud middle-class community, contrasts sharply with Armstrong, the uneducated dark-skinned man from the slums of New Orleans whose unprecedented triumph in the urban North embodied the promise of the Great Migration. Taken together, they provide a spectrum of African-American experience in the early 20th century.

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For the first seven episodes-that is, through about 1945-these inspiring stories serve well as a narrative framework. Up to this point, both Ellington and Armstrong had been simultaneously at the peak of their musical powers and a powerful presence in American popular culture. That changed after World War II, however, when the landscape of jazz was irrevocably altered by the rise of the modern jazz known as bebop. Burns and Ward choose to ignore this fact. Through the end of the film, they continue to use Armstrong and Ellington to stand in metonymically for jazz itself. This gives the documentary as a whole a strangely skewed perspective, albeit one consistent with its creators' basic assumptions about the role of jazz in American culture.

The mode of storytelling with which Burns and Ward are most comfortable is that of affirmation and triumph. This in itself is hardly remarkable-virtually all modern histories tell a similarly upbeat tale in which jazz rises from its humble origins in the cultural practices of an oppressed minority to become, in that often invoked phrase, "America's classical music." The distinctive twist that Burns and Ward offer is to identify a particular historical moment when jazz fully realized its musical and cultural potential. That moment was the Swing Era, roughly 1935-1945, when jazz was both an "authentic" art music and "the most popular music in America," an engaging and culturally potent mix of aesthetic integrity and "pure pleasure."

It's obvious why this particular interpretation would appeal to Burns and Ward. As historians, they must have been alive to the possibilities of linking the liberating dance culture of swing to the populist upheaval of New Deal politics. Recent books by David Stowe (Swing Changes) and Lewis Erenberg (Swingin' the Dream) have made essentially the same case, but there is no better medium than film for showing the emotional and physical appeal of swing, its capacity to cut across boundaries of age, race, and class. Among the film's emotional highlights are the sheer joy on the faces of interracial audiences at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and at the 1938 "festival of swing" at Randall's Island in New York City [CLIP: Episode 6, "A Reason for Living"]. For Burns and Ward, this is the redemptive power of jazz in action. In the midst of the Depression, according to the narration, jazz was "called upon" to "lift the spirits and raise the morale of a frightened country. And in the process, it would begin to break down the barriers that had separated Americans from each other for centuries." Nor was this process interrupted by the coming of war. If anything, World War II gave jazz a new international significance. Once again jazz was "called upon," but this time "to play a new role as a symbol of democracy in a world threatened by fascism and tyranny."

What this interpretation elides, however, is that jazz enthusiasts of the time-precisely those who have shaped our modern conception of what "jazz" is-instinctively mistrusted the openly commercial orientation of swing. Some of this inevitably leaks into the film. Artie Shaw, the swing bandleader famous for his ambivalence toward the workings of mass-market capitalism, minces no words: "Commercial music was execrable, it sickened you." James Lincoln Collier, a jazz historian who absorbed swing as a part of adolescence ("we were rebels, doing something our parents didn't know about or like very much"), makes it clear that, as a jazz aficionado, he had some work to do to sort out the wheat from the chaff. "When we talk about 'swing,'" he explains on-camera, "it's pretty dicey whether we're going to call this jazz or not. Because a great deal of that music was pretty commercial stuff." Comments like these are not allowed to add up to much, however; or if they are, they are deployed as a transparently melodramatic device. An example of the latter comes halfway through the film. After the initial triumphs of swing, the mood suddenly turns somber. "By the late 1930s," the narrator intones, "swing was big business. But commerce had too often led to compromise. The individual expression that had been at the heart of jazz was too often kept under wraps." The solution, however, lies close at hand: the blues-oriented Kansas City big-band style of Count Basie arrives to "return swing to its roots" and provide a "joyous and liberating alternative to commercial swing." [CLIP: Episode 6, beginning]

The transformation of swing into bebop is therefore somewhat bewildering. Suddenly, there is something wrong in the world of jazz. Musicians are "dissatisfied" and "defiant," eager to rebel "against all those blue suits we had to wear in the big swing bands." In places like Minton's Playhouse in Harlem isolated from the "regimentation of the swing bands," they gather to "question the most basic assumptions of jazz" and to "free�jazz from the tyranny of popular taste." The result is a new music that, although still called "jazz," is described in radically different terms. If swing was full of joy and excitement, the new music is "filled with danger" and "risk." The sound of Charlie Parker's alto saxophone is "hard, brittle, devoid of pity," the sonic equivalent of a prick in the leg by a pin, while Sonny Rollins will (on a good night) "tear the hair off your head." Even Billie Holiday, praised earlier for her "insouciance," is eulogized four episodes later for the "pain" and "heartbreaking" quality of her singing. If swing had charmed the masses by being immediately accessible, bebop seemed to challenge and even alienate. In the eighth episode, Wynton Marsalis comes on camera to explain why: When an art form is created, the question is how do you come to it? Not how does it come to you. Like Beethoven's music is not going to come to you. Or the art of Picasso is not going to come to you. Shakespeare-you have to go to it. And when you go to it you get the benefit of it [CLIP: Episode 8, before "Trying to Play Clean"].

In short, a corner has been turned-and, as the narrator is fond of saying, "jazz would never be the same again." While Jazz remains openly respectful of more modern styles, it is clear that something important has been lost: the easy relationship with a mass audience that, in the filmmakers' reading, gave jazz its transcendent cultural meanings. Never mind that for most contemporary jazz fans, the appeal of the music is precisely that it is not for everyone. The sub-cultural edge, the air of alienation that is so visible in jazz photography and album cover art since 1950, is a sign of the music's self-definition as something set apart from the mainstream. Burns and Ward will have none of this. In hipster parlance, they don't dig it. In a recent interview, Ward confessed that "I'm not as sympathetic to a lot of recent music as I was to earlier stuff" [American Heritage, December/January 2001, 65], and it shows. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk-these are the names that dominate contemporary jazz discourse, the past that lives on in the present. Burns and Ward continue to cling to their earlier definition, implicitly sympathizing with the "millions of people who either didn't like or hadn't heard of Charlie Parker and bebop" for whom "Louis Armstrong's music was the very definition of jazz."

Thus the highly unsatisfying conclusion to the film. The plot line is simple: not coincidentally, just about the time that Armstrong and Ellington die-the early 1970s-jazz itself dies. One remarkable sequence is very like a funeral: while the camera pans over an empty club, the narrator solemnly lists all the venues, from the Cotton Club to the Five Spot, that no longer exist [CLIP: Episode 10, just before "Homecoming"]. Knowledgeable jazz fans may receive this news with a certain indifference, since clubs come and go all the time, but the sense of gloom is nevertheless contagious. The death of jazz is then followed by the highly touted "jazz renaissance" of the 1980s, which figures here as a resurrection. But what about jazz of the 1970s? The list of major artists omitted from the film grows particularly long here: Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Weather Report, Sun Ra, David Murray, Pat Metheny, Anthony Braxton. Granted, Burns is within his rights not to turn his film into a comprehensive encyclopedia-"We've only got one apron," he says, "[so] we're going to take back the choicest fruit" [Noah Robischon, "The 'Jazz' Messenger," Entertainment Weekly 8 December 2000]. Still, the erasure of history this represents is dizzying.

Is it "too soon" to pass judgment on jazz after 1974? Historians may ponder that question at their leisure, but there is also the question of whether a documentary of this kind need be in the business of passing judgment in the first place. Why couldn't Burns have provided us with a kaleidoscopic portrait of jazz in its variegated glory at century's end? He dismisses such a possibility as mere "journalism," as if linking the past with the present were not the province of the historian. I beg to differ. Any coherent historical narrative offers the past in the service of the present, and the portrait of jazz one takes away from this film is that of an artistic tradition deeply wounded by the loss of its founding fathers and struggling, against all odds, to regain some of the glory of its past. That's not the jazz I know. Despite its often brilliant evocation of jazz to mid-century, Ken Burns's Jazz does not help us to understand jazz as it exists today, and that is an opportunity sorely missed.

Scott DeVeau
University of Virginia