March 31,
2001
The Aesthetic
Crimes of Ken Burns
Now, That's Not Jazz
By Jeffrey St Clair
Ken Burn's interminable documentary
Jazz starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there.
Burns heralds jazz as the great American contribution to world
music and sets it up as a kind of roadmap to racial relations
across the 20th century. But surely that distinction belongs
to the blues, the music born on the plantations of the Mississippi
delta. Indeed, though Burns underplays this, jazz sprang from
the blues. But so did R&B, rock-and-roll, funk and hip hop.
But Burns is a classicist,
who is offended by the rawer sounds of the blues, its political
dimension and inescapable class dynamic. Instead, Burns fixates
on a particular kind of jazz music that appeals to his PBS sensibility:
the swing era. It's a genre of jazz that enables Burns to throw
around phrases such "Ellington is our Mozart." He
sees jazz as art form in the most culturally elitist sense, as
being a museum piece, beautiful but dead, to be savored like
a stroll through a gallery of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
His film unspools for 19 hours
over seven episodes: beginning in the brothels of New Orleans
and ending with the career of saxophonist Dexter Gordon. But
in the end it didn't cover all that much ground. The film fixates
on three figures: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the young
Miles Davis. There are sidetrips and footnotes to account for
Sidney Bechet, Billie Holliday, Bix Beiderbecke, Count Basie,
Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane.
But the arc of his narrative
is the rise and fall of jazz. For Burns, jazz reached its apogee
with Armstrong and Ellington and its denouement with Davis' 1959
recording, Kind of Blue. For Burns and company it's been all
downhill since then: he sees the avant guarde recordings of Coltrane,
Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor and the growth of the fusion
movement as a form artistic degeneracy. When asked to name his
top ten jazz songs, Burns didn't include a single piece after
1958. His film packs in everything that's been produced since
Kind of Blue (40 years worth of music) into a single griping
episode. Even Kind of Blue-the most explicated jazz session in
history-gets shoddy treatment from Burns in the film, who elides
any mention of pianist Bill Evans, the man who gave the record
its revolutionary modal sound.
This is typical of the Burns
method. His films all construct a pantheon of heroes and anti-heroes,
little manufactured dramas of good and evil. Armstrong and Ellington
are gods to be worshipped (despite their fllirtations with Hollywood
glitz), but Davis and Coltrane (both at root blues musicians
to our ears) are fallen idols--Coltrane into the exquisite abstractions
of Giant Steps and Love Supreme and Miles into the funk and fusion
of Bitches Brew, On the Corner and his amazing A Tribute to Jack
Johnson. Coleman, the sonic architect of the Free Jazz movement,
is anathema.
It's easy to see why. Burns
boasts that his American trilogy-the Civil War, Baseball and
Jazz-is at bottom a history of racial relations. But it's not
a history so much as a fantasy meant for the white suburban audiences
who watch his movies. For Burns, it's a story of a seamless movement
toward integration: from slavery to emancipation, segregation
to integration, animus to harmony. For every black hero, there
is a white counterpart: Frederick Douglas/Lincoln, Jackie Robinson/Branch
Rickey, Louis Armstrong/Tommy Dorsey. In other words, a feel-good
narrative of white patronage and understanding.
This, in part, explains why
Burns recoils from the fact that Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and
their descendents have taken jazz not toward soft, white-friendly
swing sound but deeper into the urban black experience. When
Davis went electric, it was as significant a move as Dylan coming
out on with a rock-and-roll band (and not just any band, but
the Hawks). In 1966. Dylan was jeered by the folkie elites as
a "Judas"; and, despite the fact that Bitches Brew
went on to be one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time,
Davis is still being slammed. Burns includes a quote in his film
denouncing Davis's excursions into fusion as a "denaturing"
of jazz.
The Burns style-drilled into
viewers over his previous films, the Civil War, Baseball and
Frank Lloyd Wright-is irritating and as condescending as any
Masterpiece Theatre production of a minor novel by Trollope:
episodic, monotonous, edgeless. By now his technique is as predictable
as the plot of an episode of "Friends": the zoom shot
on a still photo, followed by a slow pan, a pull back, then a
portentous pause-all the while a monotonous narration explains
the obvious at length.
The series is narrated by a
troika of neo-cons: Wynton Marsalis, the favorite trumpeter of
the Lincoln Center patrons; writer Albert Murray, who chastised
the militant elements of the civil rights and anti-war movements
with his pal Ralph Ellison; and Stanley Crouch, the Ward Connerly
of music critics. This trio plays the part that Shelby Foote
did for Burns' previous epic, the Civil War-a sentimental, morbid
and revisionist take on what Foote, an unrepentant Southern romanticist,
wistfully referred to as the war between the states.
Instead of interviewing contemporary
jazz musicians, Burns sought out Marsalis, a trumpeter who is
stuck in the past. "When Marsalis was 19 he was a fine jazz
trumpeter," says Pierre Sprey, president of Mapleshade
Records, a jazz and blues label. "But he was getting
his ass kicked every night in Art Blakey's band. I don't think
he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He's
a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical
music. He has no clue what's going on now."
Crouch brings similar baggage
to the table. "Crouch started out as a modern jazz drummer",
a veteran of the New York jazz scene tells CounterPunch. "But
he wasn't very good. And finally he was booted from a lot of
the avant garde sessions. He's had a vendetta ever since."
The excessive emphasis in the
series on Louis Armstrong, often featuring very inferior work,
no doubt stems from the fact that Gary Giddins, another consultant
for the series, wrote a book on Armstrong.
Burns' parting shot is the
story of Dexter Gordon, a tenor saxophonist whose life is more
compelling than his playing. Typically Burns transforms Gordon's
life into a morality play, a condensation of his entire film:
born in L.A. Gordon mastered to the Parker/bebop method and when
it passed him by, he battled depression and heroin addiction,
fled to Copenhagen, and finally returned to the US in the late
1970s enjoying a brief renaissance in high priced jazz clubs
in New York and DC, starred in Bernard Tavernier's tribute to
bebop 'Round Midnight and died in 1990.
How different Burns' film would
have been if, instead of Gordon, he had trained his camera on
Sonny Rolllins, who, like Coltrane, learned much from Gordon
but ultimately surpassed him. Of course, Rolllins is still alive
and still making strikingly innovative music. His latest album,
This Is What I Do, is one of his best. But this, of course, would
have undermined the Burns/Marsalis/Crouch thesis that the avant
garde and Afro-centric strains, which began about the same time
Gordon left the states, killed jazz.
After enduring Jazz in its
entirety, there's only one conclusion to be reached: Burns doesn't
really like music. In the 19 hours of film, he never lets one
song play to completion, anywhere near completion. Yet there
is a constant chatter riding on top of the music. It's annoying
and instructive, as if Burns himself were both bored of the entire
project and simultaneously hypnotized by the sound of his own
words interpreting what he won't allow us to hear.
This may be the ultimate indictment
of Burns' Jazz: the compulsion to verbalize what is essentially
a nonverbal artform. It's also insulting; he assumes that the
music itself, if allowed to be heard and felt, wouldn't be able,
largely on its own volition, to move and educate those who (unlike
Burns) are willing open their ears and really listen. In a film
supposedly about music, the music itself has been relegated to
the background, as a distant soundtrack for trite observations
on culture and neo-Spenglerian notions about the arc of American
cap-H History. In that sense, Burns and his cohorts don't even
demonstrate faith in the power of the swing-era music they offer
up as the apex of jazz.
There are some great documentaries
on popular music. Three very different ones come to mind: Bert
Stern's beautiful Jazz on a Summer's Day, which integrates jazz,
swing, avant guard, gospel and rock-n-roll all into one event,
Robert Mugge's Deep Blues, a gorgeously shot and recorded road
movie about the blues musicians of the Mississippi Delta, and
Jean-Luc Godard's One+One, which documents the recording of the
Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil. All are vibrant films
that let the music and musicians do the talking. But Ken Burns
learned nothing from any of them. Watching his Jazz is equivalent
to listening to a coroner speak into a dictaphone as he dissects
a corpse. CP
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