Ken Burns’ Jazz
PBS Documentary Series
Parts I, II, & III: A
Review
Ken Burns is at it again¾teaching us what makes our country a great nation. With his latest series airing on PBS stations this month Burns completes his trilogy of films documenting America’s greatness.
First came The Civil War, the 11-hour series that seized out attention for weeks on end in 1991 and brought us back to the conflict that tested our Constitution and cost 600,000 lives. Then, in 1994 Burns gave us Baseball¾ 1080 minutes of drama, idolatry and analysis about the game he believes is crucial to understanding our national character. Now comes Jazz, the history of America’s unique contribution to the art of humankind. Running through this trilogy of documentaries is the story of race in America. It is the unifying theme and it is the story of our struggle to make a society worthy of the ideals expressed in the
Constitution.
Jazz is Burns’ longest (19 hours) and his most ambitious work to date. If you are like me, a casual jazz fan, or if you are a dedicated fan, you have awaited the combination of our premier social historian/documentarian and our greatest art form with wild anticipation. The opening three installments offer no disappointment for the wait. Seven more installments will be parceled out over the remaining weeks of the month.
Part I: Gumbo. The first installment paints a
portrait of New Orleans, birthplace of jazz, at the turn of the last century,
and presents the origin of jazz as a gumbo of musical forms, including minstrel
music, ragtime, brass band parade music, and even opera. It is hard to imagine how a culture without
electronics could have anything we might recognize as “popular music”, but the
first episode paints the picture vividly, describing how traveling minstrel
shows, marching bands, concert bands, music hall performances and gatherings in
the parlors of our homes formed our collective musical culture. On the edge of
all this was the music of the honky tonks and whorehouses, the blues.
Every gumbo starts a with a roux, a mixture of fat and flour, carefully blended and browned on the bottom of the pot before the other ingredients are added. Wynton Marsalis, Burns' principal commentator, says blues was the roux in the musical gumbo that produced jazz and every other form of American popular music. The blues they refer to was not the blues music we know today, born in the rural Mississippi Delta, but the blues of New Orleans played with brass and banjos. The music of lament.
Burns tells the story of early jazz as a chain of musical biographies, starting with the great New Orleans trumpet player Buddy Bolden. Bolden was richly described by his contemporaries as a giant who influenced all the players of his time, but he remains inaccessible to us because he was never recorded. Jelly Roll Morton, born in 1890 of Creole ancestry often claimed, falsely we are told, to have invented jazz but he was the first to write it down. “Gumbo” ends with the introduction of the figure who most dominates the story of jazz, Louis Armstrong. All the world knows Satchmo but what many will be surprised to learn here and in the episodes to follow is the depth of his genius and the extraordinary scope of his influence.
Part II: The Gift (1917-1924). Louis Armstrong was a gift from the gods, say some, and God himself, say others. He was a character so much larger than life that such statements are not mere hyperbole. His clownish persona and his universal celebrity tended to cloud his musical genius. Even Burns’ principal commentator, Wynton Marsalis, at one time considered Armstrong a mere Uncle Tom, a man who performed antics to please the white folks [a fact not mentioned here]. But Marsalis changed his mind when he tried to learn some of Armstrong’s seemingly simple solos. The more Marsalis studied Armstrong the more he marveled at Armstrong’s unsurpassed virtuosity. Story after story in this episode show Armstrong as a musician of superhuman strength and stamina and attest to his resilience and resourcefulness as a human being, his ability to make lemonade out of the lemons life gave him.
As a fatherless young boy he worked for a Jewish family of coal vendors, named Karnoffsky. He would blow a tin horn from atop the wagon to announce their arrival in a neighborhood. The Karnoffskys nurtured Louis and saw that he got a good meal every evening at their table. At age twelve he was arrested and sent to the Colored Waifs Home for shooting a pistol into the air to celebrate New Years. It was there he learned to play the cornet. The telling of Satchmo’s life and the flourishing of his immensely influential talent is accomplishment enough for a series like this. If it seems from time to time like hagiography it is good reason because if jazz has a saint it is Satchmo.
Part III: Our Language (1924-1929). By the 1920’s jazz had become truly a national music, dominated by great personalities who lived life with a vengeance. The details are often astonishing. New Orleans saxophonist Sidney Bechet was a musical genius, a megalomaniac, and a man with a violent temper. Before 1925, Marsalis tells us, only Bechet could share the bandstand with Armstrong without embarrassing himself. By age 22 he had served a prison term in England for a violent altercation with a prostitute. When he came to Harlem he confronted saxophonist Coleman Hawkins for his disparaging remarks about New Orleans musicians. He played so fiercely in Hawkins’ direction that Hawkins ran of the bandstand, out of the building and down the street with Bechet right behind him, blowing his soprano saxophone all the while. Years later while touring Europe Bechet pulled a pistol on a French piano player who had disputed Bechet’s reading of a chord change. “Sidney Bechet does not make mistakes,” he told him, and challenged him to a gunfight. The result was a shoot out in the streets of Paris at rush hour. Bechet wounded three people, none of them his adversary, and went to prison for his deed, though he was released and deported less than a year later.
Other rich characters include Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Benny began learning music at Hebrew school where he was assigned the clarinet because he was such a shrimp of a boy. We see a film clip of teen age Benny Goodman playing with a nationally famous dance band, and we learn that he made enough money to buy his father a newsstand so he wouldn’t have to continue working in the Chicago slaughter house shoveling lard. And saddest of all, his father never saw son Benny play professionally. He was struck and killed in the street on the very day he planned to see his son’s Chicago debut with the dance band. Until that day he had never owned a suit of clothes that would, in his mind, hide the shame of his poverty.
Duke Ellington became the prince of Manhattan society when the famous Cotton Club hired him and his band as the steady entertainment. He composed new music for the lavish shows performed there and wrote arrangements that defied the musical conventions of the day. Ironically, and most importantly for Burns’ point of view, the Cotton Club, located in the heart of Harlem, would not admit Negroes.
Jazz is classic Ken Burns. His techniques of filming and narrating have become a new standard for documentaries. He combines still photos, lovingly panned by the camera, with film footage, voice over speaking the words of the real characters, talking heads giving commentary, and, of course, music. He does not tease us with short excerpts, but rather indulges us with complete performances of some of the greatest music composed in America. His commentators are not uniformly articulate or interesting. But they are all displayed in his characteristic lighting, fit for a Dutch master portraitist, full of golden hues and deep shadows. And each of his major works has its principal commentator. The Civil War had Shelby Foote whose drawl and grizzled face evoked the ghost of the Confederacy; Baseball had Negro League Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil, whose gentle dignity reminded us how badly we treated some of our best athletes by excluding them from the major leagues until the late 1940’s; and Jazz has the cherubic-faced Wynton Marselis, who is all New Orleans and not a little hubris.
Charles Sawyer lives in Boxford. He is the author of The Arrival of B.B. King, the authorized biography of B.B. King. His blues band, 2120 South Michigan Avenue, plays in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. His websites are http://fas.harvard.edu/~sawyer and http://www.2120southmichiganavenue.com .