Ken Burns - Jazz
 
 
Director:  Ken Burns
Year:  2001
Rating: 9.0
It is a bit of a commitment to watch this 10 part series that must run close to 18 hours, but it is well worth your time. Jazz has been out of fashion really since the 1960s but it is our heritage; the great legendary names, the music, the stories. This taught me so much and I loved every minute of it. The history of jazz is a sad one to some degree. Built from the blues and misery of blacks across America into an art form that for thirty years was the American musical form that took over the world. But within this there are so many stories of early death, drugs, poverty, struggle and glorious music that moved a country.



I won’t profess to be a jazz aficionado - I grew up with rock music – but I used to hear my dad playing his jazz LPs on the weekends – usually big bands that he grew up with and often went to see in person at a ballroom in Worcester Massachusetts in the 1930s – the Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa – mainly white jazz musicians that a white working class city like Worcester loved and allowed. I am mainly a fan of vocalists – to me Sinatra and Fitzgerald are the best in the world at interpreting and phrasing lyrics – Billie Holiday moves me close to tears with the pain you can sense in her life through her song, a songbird like Sarah Vaughan is near perfection and others like Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Julie London, Dinah Washington, Dakota Staton, Nancy Wilson and Anita O’Day cross my turntable at times. As I have gotten older my appreciation for them has increased a lot.




The strictly instrumentalists are admittedly less played by me – I love the romantic period of Miles Davis and his collaborations with Gil Evans are brilliant, Louis and Duke get a huge amount of press in this documentary – well-deserved – others like Dave Brubeck, Charlie Haden and his noir influenced music and Chet Baker are favorites. But I was much less learned of the major influence of the musicians who came out of the Swing Era – Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and especially Charlie Parker. But now I realize how brilliant they are; how their music is so beautifully composed. The problem is you could not dance to it – jazz had been popularized by the ability to dance to it and now you couldn’t. And what happened was that a music came along that could be danced to. Rock and Roll. And jazz fell out of popularity – the greats like Ellington and Armstrong found it harder and harder to find work – and the jazz that was still performed was in small clubs. And that is where it still is.



This documentary lays this all out – follows the most influential musicians from the beginning to the end – showed how jazz evolved from its early days as Ragtime in New Orleans through Dixieland to Swing – how much Armstrong changed everything – how individual musicians like Parker and Coltrane changed how jazz was played. Hundreds of clips as you would expect and experts chiming in – so many names along the way - the racial divide and the issues that black musicians had -  it is all fabulous and a part of our heritage. Jazz is still everywhere - soundtracks in film and TV - but few people buy jazz records any more.