It Don’t Mean A Thing
directed by Ken Burns.
PBS, 2001.
The first shot you see is New York City at night. The first sound you hear is Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, and the first voice is Wynton Marsalis. And there, plus a few additions and repetitions, you pretty much have it: Ken Burns’s Jazz.
There are two great twentieth century American art forms, and now one of them has been used to explicate the other. Ken Burns’s Jazz takes up nineteen hours of air time, although some of that time is taken up with vintage “soundies”—the videos of the day—and promotional material. Burns says it is seventeen and a half hours long. At any rate, is is about three times as long as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed.
Jazz arrives preceded by a huge marketing blitz. Videos of the film were available before the film finished airing on PBS, for $149.50, or $199.50 for DVD. There is also an elegant coffee table book from Knopf, for $65, and a five CD boxed set for $59.98. Further, the two record companies most closely involved with the boxed set, Sony and Verve, have released an additional twenty-two CDs, eleven each, dealing with individual musicians. This has the unfortunate effect of turning the film into a long infomercial for its products, and reducing its heroes, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, to action figures.
The first track of the CD set is by Louis Armstrong, and the last is by Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, of which Mr Marsalis is director, thus recapitulating the early jazz movies in which the jazz man finally becomes legitimate by playing with a symphony orchestra—“making a lady out of jazz,” as Paul Whiteman called it. This may be the course of the music as Mr. Burns sees it, and is almost certainly how Mr. Marsalis sees it—as a long tradition leading up to and culminating in himself—but it hardly is the only view, or even the majority view. It is, however, the view that most people will now have. As jazz retreats from the night clubs and enters the academy, these tapes are going to become a ubiquitous teaching tool.
Ken Burns has said that six years ago, when he began this project, he had hardly listened to jazz at all. Some might think it arrogant of him to suppose he could make a long film on a subject he knew so little about. But, like George W. Bush, he was shrewd enough to surround himself with experienced hands. In such a situation, though, the neophyte is likely to wind up in the hands of people at least as skilled in self-promotion as in the ostensible subject. Dick Cheney was charged with finding someone to run as Vice-President with Mr. Bush, and who did he find? Mr Marsalis has been in charge at Lincoln Center for years, where his programming and personnel choices have made him controversial. His spokesperson has been Stanley Crouch, a burly man sufficiently light on his feet to have been one of the five authors introduced to America by our new First Lady on the night before the inauguration. In a fallow, regressive period of jazz history, Mr. Marsalis has become the Prize Boy, the King’s Own Trumpeter, the Designated Jazz Musician. And along the way he has learned that history depends on who writes—or speaks—it.
For all the skyscraper-and-neon shots this film contains, it could have been called Night and the City. For all the shots of men on the road it could have been called Planes, Trains and Automobiles or, in Allen Ginsberg’s phrase, boxcars boxcars boxcars. It is curious that, in a project where the main problem would seem to be “What do you show while the music’s playing?” Burns chose to spend most of his time in the earlier era of jazz, where the least film is available.
For example, the first great jazz musician is generally considered to be Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornetist. There is only one known photograph of him and no known recordings, although rumors of an Edison cylinder make it jazz’s Maltese Falcon. The story is that one day Bolden wandered away from a parade in which he was playing and spent the rest of his life in a hospital for the insane, his brain having been ravaged by syphilis. So what does Burns do? He closes in on a shot of a man who is almost certainly not Buddy Bolden leaving a parade which may not even have taken place in New Orleans while we hear Wynton Marsalis play an approximation of the music Bolden is thought to have played. For all the anonymous newspaper quotes he employs, Burns used nothing from Coming Through Slaughter, the wonderful impressionistic book about Bolden by Michael Ondaatje, proving, as Burns does throughout the film, that there is more than one way to have a tin ear.
Voice-overs are an enormous problem. For all the hours devoted to music in this film, only one piece plays complete without interruption: Louis Armstrong’s masterpiece, “West End Blues.” Burns says that one of his main questions to himself was, “How do you know when to shut up and listen?” One possible answer would seem to be: when the music is more interesting than you are. Burns interrupts classics like Sidney Bechet’s “Summertime” and Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” being played, without identification, to an audience that may never have heard them before. These seminal works do not appeax in the CD box either, nor do Charlie Parker’s “Parker’s Mood” or Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round About Midnight.” (A far more useful survey is The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, assembled by Martin Williams. It ranks up there with Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.)
While Louis Armstrong is playing, a musician named Matt Glaser shakes his head in time, and scats along. Then Wynton Marsalis imitates vocally the sound of Sidney Bechet playing the soprano saxophone. This is recorded over, and drowns out, the sound of Sidney Bechet playing the soprano saxophone. Later, Marsalis imitates the sound of the entire Basie band, instrument by instrument, a moment Burns says he loves. But what is needed, as Wallace Stevens said, is “not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself.”
If there is an epiphany to be found, Burns will miss it. His voice-overs recite encomiums from people long forgotten, but when he comes to a classic early portrait of Ellington from The New Yorker, he cites the magazine, but not the author, Richard O. Boyer. And there is no mention of the great conductor Ernest Ansermet’s prescient appreciation of the young Sidney Bechet, whom he heard in Europe. You might think that someone who made his reputation with Civil War soldiers writing home would have a feeling for the heartbreaking letters King Oliver wrote his sister at the end of his life. And that someone whose forte is moving a camera over still photographs might have included some of the striking portraits of New Orleans jazz musicians taken by a teenaged Look magazine photographer named Stanley Kubrick. And even though Artie Shaw tells him how difficult it was to travel with Billie Holiday, he didn’t get—or use—what Shaw told me the one afternoon I met him: that it was actually in his contract how many feet the black trumpeter Hot Lips Page had to keep between himself and the other members of the band while onstage (I think it was fifteen). And while it isn’t mentioned, the clarinet music heard just before the introduction of Benny Goodman, who, with Shaw, was one of two Russian Jewish clarinetists to popularize swing, was Klezmer music. Jass didn’t come only from ragtime, nor were ghettos always black.
Along with his films on the Civil War and baseball, Burns says that Jazz is part of a trilogy on America, and that the connection between them is improvisation. Still, Burns manages to miss what might be the most acclaimed instance of improvisation in the history of jazz: in his section on the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert and its rousing closer, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” he neither mentions nor plays Jess Stacy’s transcendant, unplanned piano solo that was the high point of the evening and Stacy’s career. Burns himself refuses to improvise, and instead recycles his favorite licks: camera moves over still photographs, talking heads, quotes from documents, background music. And that may be because, for long stretches, Jazz is not about jazz at all.
It is about the relations between blacks and whites in America. So were the films about the Civil War and baseball. It is obviously Ken Burns’s subject, and it is a worthy one. But it seems strange for a show called Jazz to find time for A. Philip Randolph, but not for Bill Evans, the most influential jazz pianist of the last half century, or for the greatest of blues pianists, Jimmy Yancey, whose story you might think would appeal to Burns—he spent his last years as a groundskeeper for the Chicago White Sox. Burns tells us about the two-year recording ban during World War II, and the segregation of the troops, but for all his cameras’ love of old record labels, there is no look at or mention of V-Disc, under which, during the strike, the musicians’ union allowed recordings to be sent overseas to the troops. Many of these were made by Duke Ellington, and they are collectors’ items today. And for all the assiduous collecting of white insults to black musicians in the south, where is this one to the man who, while he might not be America’s greatest composer, had a compositional gift that certainly makes him a greater figure than Armstrong—“Duke, if you’d been a white man, you’d have been a great musician”? While overlooking this, Burns tells us about a man who listened to Armstrong one night and went on to be a Supreme Court clerk who worked on Brown v. Board of Education. Far better to have told of Ellington’s pride on the night of FDR’s death, when his network radio show was kept on all night so there would be a frequency over which to transmit necessary bulletins, and Ellington’s was the only music heard on that sorrowful night.
This returns us to Marsalis, who talks about “Louis” and “Duke” in this film as though he’d had lunch with them yesterday, even though he has said he didn’t get Ellington’s music until he was in his twenties. Nor has this kept him from attaching his name as co-composer to rearrangements of suites by the greatest orchestrator in jazz history, or, for that matter, to Igor Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat.” If he reveres Ellington so much, he might have demonstrated it by repaying the Pulitzer committee’s refusal to give his hero a prize by declining the one given to him.
Classical pianists have a phrase for their colleagues who win prizes all the time. The best, the ones with real temperament, usually offend someone, and don’t win—the great Martha Argerich once quit as judge at an International Chopin competition when it did not award the prize to Ivo Pogorelich. But the kids who win the prizes are neither the best nor the worst; they are those who know what the judges want and how to give it to them. They are called competition pianists. I think that Wynton Marsalis, who has all the technique in the world but never played four bars that moved me, is a competition pianist. I think that Ken Burns, whom PBS has taken to calling “America’s Filmmaker”—were you polled?—is another.
The great tenor saxophonist Lester Young once approached a young hotshot who was showing off by racing around all over his horn and said, “That’s all very nice, but can you sing me a song?”
Young shows what he meant in his brief blues chorus that so moves Billie Holiday in the clip taken from the CBS program The Sound of Jazz. And Ken Burns has assembled other wonderful stuff. From the same CBS show comes Count Basie intently watching Thelonious Monk play the piano. A shot of a riverboat at night shows how entranced the young Jack Teagarden must have been when he stood on the shore and heard Louis Armstrong playing from one. Armstrong himself, in a tuxedo, probably from the Thirties, is as much a dancer as he is a singer and trumpet player as he performs “Dinah.” Marsalis closes his eyes against the insupportable thought of racism. The recurring shot of the young, tuxedoed Frankie Trumbauer holding his saxophone like an offering. Dave Brubeck tells of being shown the cover of Time magazine with his picture on it by Duke Ellington, who should have had the cover first.
Several fine jazz writers are connected with Burns’s project: Otis Ferguson, one of the great precursors of today’s critics, named but not identified; the historian Dan Morgenstern, who was a consultant to the film; Nat Hentoff, who speaks with the authority of someone who was there. But the island of lucidity in an often gaseous sea of platitudes by dancers, actors, and baseball players who had a nice time one night is Gary Giddins, the jazz critic of The Village Voice, who is unfailingly interesting and informative.
Some critics have objected to what they call the film’s use of the “great man” theory of the music. In a music so personal that each player has his own tone, time, harmony, in which an accolade is to say a player is “telling his story,” in which two players (Armstrong and Parker) had an influence so pervasive that players of every instrument tried to sound like them, I don’t know how else you’d do it. Indeed, the lack of great men is probably what’s been wrong with jazz, ever since a steady flow of them—Parker to Rollins to Coltrane—stopped suddenly in 1967 with Coltrane’s death, almost exactly contemporaneous with the ascendency of rock and roll. Even before that, it had lost its social function. It is no accident that Benny Goodman’s theme song was called “Let’s Dance.”
“I’m about history,” Ken Burns says, “and history is about stories that are over.” So, after Coltrane’s death, when he is no longer able to apply the elegiac mode, the years go by in a rush, with some important figures not mentioned at all. Prior to 1950, the judgmental work has been done for us. It requires no great acumen to call Armstrong and Ellington the two great figures of the music. But after that, the times require a nicety of judgement that Burns doesn’t possess.
Or could it be that a critical evaluation of those years would reveal that Miles Davis bestrides them like a Colossus, diminishing Wynton Marsalis’s claims to importance? Stanley Crouch made his reputation with a notoriously vicious article about Miles. And Davis returned the compliment by saying of his would-be usurper, “He keeps making speeches, but I don’t notice anyone asking him any questions.” Which is as good a description of Marsalis’s role in this film as you could want.
So it’s Ken Burns’s Jazz, but it isn’t mine, and it may not be yours. Who knows what the future will bring? Since Ornette Coleman posited a music with no set rhythm, chords, or melody lines, there was no place further for the music to go, so it turned back to the neoconservatism we have today, just as classical music reacted to total serialism with minimalism. The composer Arthur Honegger foresaw this in the late Forties, saying that we would atone for all the cyanide we were getting by being forced to drink sugar in the future. Well, the future is here, and we’ve got plenty of sugar—they call it smooth jazz or contemporary jazz—but only a few great men, and fewer all the time, as they keep dying off, with hardly a candidate in sight, unless you count a modest man like the guitarist Jim Hall, who makes it look so easy no one notices. Not even Ken Burns, who didn’t include him.
Or maybe jazz did die way back then. I remember back in the Sixties, when the jazz magazine Metronome folded, a wake was held in the magazine’s offices. In the doorway appeared the great bassist Charles Mingus, just back from England, looking very Hitchcockian in a black three-piece suit and bowler hat, with a magnum of champagne under each arm. Across the room, Mingus spotted his then trumpeter, Ted Curson. “Jazz is dead, baby,” Mingus shouted jubilantly to his sideman. “Ain’t you glad?”
Joe Goldberg is the author of Jazz Masters of the Fifties and a few hundred liner notes. He is a regular contributor to Billboard.
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