PBS puts spotlight on ‘Jazz’

In theory, jazz fans everywhere should be totally gassed by what PBS is doing this month.

With Ken Burns' epic 10-part documentary 'Jazz,' PBS is giving their beloved, under-appreciated, all-American art form 19 hours of beautifully crafted and heavily publicized fame. But as reviews of 'Jazz' in Atlantic Monthly and, of all places, the Weekly Standard, show, jazz fans - especially jazz critics - are a tough audience.

Even if you're a polka nut, you know about the existence of 'Jazz' by now.

Six years in the making, it began running Monday and will appear sporadically throughout the month of 'Jazzuary.' Packed with 75 interviews, 500 pieces of music, 2,400 still-photos and 2,000 archival film clips, 'Jazz's' mission is to document the history of jazz the way Burns' earlier PBS mega-series documented 'Baseball' (1994) and 'The Civil War' (1990).

Jazz - the music of the masses during the Swing Era, but now accounting for just 3 percent of record sales - hasn't had this much big-time media attention in decades and probably never will again. Companion coffee-table books, $200 DVD boxed sets and CD packages are available.

The PBS public relations machine went into highest gear for 'Jazz.' Everyone from Newsweek to American Heritage has cranked out a major review or article.

Even the severest critics agree there is much to love and admire about 'Jazz,' which Noah Robischon in the Dec. 8 Entertainment Weekly described as a 'staggering film' that 'attempts to portray jazz and its history as a pure expression of democracy, a musical form that transcended racism and transformed America.'

But it's safe to say that the more you know about jazz, the more likely you are to be annoyed by what Burns and his band of jazz advisers has put in or left out.

Robischon pointed out a common and obvious criticism - that Burns, a jazz novice when he started the project, overemphasizes the big-band era and devotes but two hours to the past 40 years of jazz, when 'free jazz,' fusion and other modern avante-gardisms made it the minority musical taste it is today.

American Heritage's contribution to the 'Jazz' mania is a long and reasonably interesting interview with Geoffrey Ward, who wrote the script with director Burns. Ward also wrote the $65 companion book, 'Jazz: A History of America's Music.' Its chief asset is a batch of old black-and-white performance photos of giants such as Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong.

Meanwhile, in 'I Hear America Scatting' in the January Atlantic Monthly, jazz historian Francis Davis gives director/creator Burns a sound critical beating and even questions his credentials as a documentarian.

Jazz fans can argue forever about the validity of Davis' long list of jazz greats who should have been given much more attention, including Woody Herman, Bill Evans and Pittsburgh's own Erroll Garner.

And only aficionados will care about whether jazz and blues are interchangeable. Or whether European music was only minimally important to jazz's evolution. Or whether trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the senior consultant, ruined the show by his ubiquitous on-screen presence and his deep disrespect of modern (post-1960) jazz.

But Davis also says Burns put his credibility as a social historian at risk by allowing Marsalis and others to 'present the character and motivations of long-dead musicians - without distinguishing between legend and actual memory.'

Although he admits 'Jazz' often looks and sounds good, Davis also claims Burns 'shows tendencies toward cockeyed legend, cut-rate sociology and amateur psychoanalysis.' And by taking on the entire history of jazz, he says, Burns 'doomed himself to incompleteness and superficiality.'

Lastly, Burns and his work really get hammered on racial and political grounds in the Jan. 15 Weekly Standard by Diana West, a conservative syndicated columnist.

In 'All That Jazz,' West argues that Burns - and his advisers - have created a politically charged work that aims not to help viewers 'hear the rich and varied history of jazz,' but 'to instruct us in how to see it: as the exclusive domain of the black, blues-oriented musicians who have long suffered at the hands of the white and derivative interloper.'

West says Burns consistently hyperbolizes the assessments of great black musicians such as Armstrong and Duke Ellington while cutting down the reputations of great white musicians such as Benny Goodman.

Burns' underlying point of view, she contends, is the same racial one that Marsalis and other advisers hold - that jazz is blues, that only blacks can really play blues and that white jazzmen are mediocre imitators and hangers-on.

West is tough and has little praise to offer. She says the result of Burns' hard work is 'a vigorous exercise in political correctness, a distortion of cultural history that only deepens racial division while ill-serving the music it sets out to celebrate.'

In the end, she says, 'these 19 hours of film are about too many angry axes and too many senseless words. Fortunately, what endures is the music, so much of which remains available, beckoning anyone - of any color - who has an open ear.'

Bill Steigerwald is associate editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He can be reached at (412) 320-7983 or bsteigerwald@tribweb.com .