Heads, Jazz Wins; Tails, It Loses

Well, have you had enough jazz yet?

Or maybe the more accurate question is whether you’ve had enough of Ken Burns’ “Jazz.” With the 10-episode documentary concluding Wednesday, this is the distinction that’s bothering jazz critics and more generalist commentators.

Is it jazz or is it Ken Burns? Or are we simply looking at a two-headed coin in which each side is inextricably connected to the other, but views the world from the opposite direction?

And there’s the rub. From the perspective of the people who made Ken Burns’ “Jazz,” there would seem to be little to complain about. The documentary, with its ancillary elements, has arguably become the most widely promoted and publicized presentation of the music in its century-long history. And rest assured that we will see it again, in its entirety and in bits and pieces, most likely during PBS pledge drives.

According to PBS, viewership for Episode 1 more than doubled the average PBS prime-time rating in 48 of the Nielsen overnight markets. Episode 2 did even better, and the viewership held through the next few installments. Not bad for a music that generally does a better job of dealing with creativity than with marketing. John F. Wilson, PBS’ senior vice president of programming, may even be understating it when he reports that “there is a tremendous amount of excitement about this film.”

The sales of recordings associated with the show have been equally upbeat. Amazon.com, for example, reported that the five-CD boxed set associated with the production hit the top of its best-seller chart the morning after Episode 1 aired, with as many as 19 jazz items among its top 100 best-sellers.

Add to that all the promotional efforts that have brought the music to a wide audience: boxed VHS and DVD collections, an audio-book version, a coffee-table book and dozens of recordings. In December, jazz groups played during halftime at NBA games while clips from the documentary were projected onto scoreboards. Print media have overflowed with Ken Burns features and “Jazz” commentaries for months, and retail and Internet book and record sites have offered special promotional deals.

So, because the music hasn’t been this visible at least since the days of the big swing bands, “Jazz,” with all the marketing hullabaloo, has to be good for jazz, right?

Well, yes and no--which takes us back to that coin.

Supportive commentators have taken the compassionate conservative viewpoint that all this exposure can’t help but be good for a music that has not exactly been the focal point of public attention lately. It surely has to benefit jazz to have the opportunity to be heard by the millions who will tune in to at least some portion of Burns’ production. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that the vast tapestry of music they will hear may well attract them to performances and recordings that are not represented in the series.

In that sense, “Jazz” has to be considered a major success. When was the last time you heard anyone talking about Louis Armstrong at the office water cooler? And, for that matter, how many millions of Americans now have a more accurate view of Armstrong’s vital importance to the music rather than the more familiar image of the sweating, grinning Satchmo?

But the other side of that coin, the non-Ken Burns jazz side, has darker qualities.

Consider these:

* Burns’ emphasis on a Great Man approach, which positions a few seminal figures as the music’s sole moving forces;

* a reliance on a relatively narrow definition of the music, primarily revolving around the ideas of a small group of jazz experts and observers;

* a failure to cast any significant light on the music of the past few decades;

* a surprising absence of full-fledged jazz performances (most of the reported 500 or so selections included in the documentary serve primarily as soundtrack items or are included only in short fragments).

Let’s take a look at those points, in order.

(1) While no one can argue with the primal importance of the work of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Burns’ emphasis on their careers--even during the relatively less productive periods that are characteristic of all artists--has clearly diminished the amount of time available for other figures. The result has been the omission of dozens of important players and far too quick glimpses of others.

(2) Nor is the scope of the documentary aided by the frequent presence of Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, a triumvirate whose view of the music--however thoughtful it may be--takes a conservative, even archaic view of what jazz is and isn’t. That view increasingly appears to have a cutoff point around the ‘60s. Which, certainly not coincidentally, is the point at which the documentary cycles down to a virtual halt.

(3) It’s no surprise that even mass-media publications have commented upon the fact that the documentary compresses the last 3 1/2 decades or so of jazz into the final episode.

Why such a compacted view? On the day Episode 1 aired, Burns was questioned in a CNN interview about precisely that decision. He replied that he is a historian, and that historians, in effect, deal with an overview of the past. He did not, however, clarify at what point in the past his idea of history ends and the present begins.

Burns did opine that it was too soon to know--after the passings of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, etc.--who the significant jazz voices will be. He added that whenever he had asked jazz experts to identify the important figures of the past few decades, there was no significant response. One wonders who the experts were, because it doesn’t take a weatherman to come up with a very quick list. Can we start with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea? And I’ll wager that most jazz listeners can easily add just as many choices of their own. But, of course, jazz listeners aren’t historians, are they?

(4) In his rush to position jazz as the aural representation of the improvisatory nature he feels is endemic in the American identity, in his urgency to underscore issues of race, Burns again emphasized what he has done in the past, which is to cobble together an array of visual and aural historical material, all driven--as noted above--by his Great Man perceptions. In the process, however, the music itself and the manner in which it was created took second place.

Sure, there are numerous instances in which Marsalis offers illustrated musical insights. But even here, one wonders at the choices. The legendary trumpeter Buddy Bolden was never recorded, yet we are offered a trumpet solo by Marsalis that alleges to somehow depict what he might have sounded like.

*

The documentary is on firmer ground with a pair of far less presumptuous interviews. Artie Shaw, for example, offers a brief but telling explanation of the sheer challenge of improvisation in Episode 3 when he says, “You’re trying to take an inarticulate thing and take notes and make them come out in a way that moves you . . . and when it does, you remember it for the rest of your life.”

And, in another of the documentary’s most effective passages, musician Matt Glaser offers a commentary on Armstrong’s “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” spontaneously describing the music and the solos as they’re taking place, positioning them as art and culture and social reflection. Here, for once, the production finds the correct balance between informative commentary and compelling music.

So we’ve got a bunch of pluses and minuses. How do they add up? I suspect very positively in terms of what “Jazz” actually covered. The major jazz labels will undoubtedly be delighted by the increased sales of their catalogs--that is, the classic music that is the essential stuff of the documentary. And even a small amount of knowledge about jazz is better than none.

The totals on the other side of the coin are more problematic, however. Burns may have actually done a disservice to the music by emphasizing so many dead musicians, by centering on one, largely archaic definition of the music, and by failing to acknowledge that it is alive and well, filled with creative artists and continuing to make history, even if Burns and his researchers don’t feel they have sufficient historical perspective to understand what is happening all around them.

So it comes down to this. For those of us who believe in the vitality and the importance of jazz as one of the world’s most significant creative expressions, “Jazz” has been a welcome arrival, a flawed but valuable acknowledgment of its historical relevance. But the real test will be whether “Jazz” will support the far more difficult, far more valuable task of directing audiences to live performances in clubs and concerts, to the enormous wealth of recordings (and videos) that afford opportunities to experience the music--by live as well as dead musicians--without the distractions of voice-overs and talking-head experts.