Rating: 
Summary: Glenn who?
Review: Well below his usual standards of quality. The formula used with such brilliance in the Civil war documentary has not worked its magic here. This is a poorly documented endeavor where Ken Burns seems to have ventured in an area he has obviously very little knowledge of and relied almost entierly on Wynton Marsalis' perception of jazz history or should I say Wynton Marsalis' personnal preferences. Marsalis is a great master of his instrument, that does not make him a brilliant historian. Jazz according to this documentary seems to have died somewhere in the 60's. Way to much emphasis was put on racial issues, jazz musicians are notoriously colorblind. I'm pretty tired of the perrenial implication that a tune that is commercially successfull is somewhat an inferior product, especially coming from a man who as certainly pocketed millions for his documentaries good or bad. And before I forget, thanks for the 15 seconds on Glenn Miller! Or should I say Glenn who?
Rating: 
Summary: Just OK--as far as it goes...
Review: The ultimate irony of this film is that for the supposed "democracy of this music" that it extols, Ken Burns (on Marsalis' advice, I suspect) chose to be decidedly non-inclusive by omitting any mention of the great musicians playing electric instruments. If you are interested in great guitarists in particular, you will be sorely disappointed. Marsalis' comments about "everyone having something different to contribute" are grossly hypocritical in this context, and as the episodes progressed I sensed that this "democratic" trumpet player is among the most elitist people I've seen. There's nothing really objectionable about being elitist if that's your bag; I consider myself a bit elitist about some things, but I hope I'm never brazenly hypocritical about it. For example: I think Beethoven sounds best played on period instruments, but I would never dream of making a documentary of great Beethoven interpreters that omitted Toscanini or Kempff just because the instruments were considerably different than the composer's. Burns' said in an interview on "Charlie Rose" that he was basically led by Marsalis' hand because he was not terribly interested or knowledgeable about the music before beginning the project (that was the gist of his comments, not a quote). He appeared to be quite insecure and deferential to Marsalis, who was interviewed along with him. I suspect that Marsalis had a disproportionate influence on this film. Don't get me wrong, there is some interesting stuff here for someone just getting into jazz, but--as noted in other reviews here--too much is left out from the post-1960 era. I guess Marsalis would agree that Miles Davis was right when he said "jazz was dead" in the '70's. In fact, this film should be called "Ken Burns ACOUSTIC JAZZ IS THE REAL JAZZ" or "JAZZ ACCORDING TO WYNTON MARSALIS' PERSONAL TASTES As Told To Ken Burns".
Rating: 
Summary: Great Documentary on Jazz
Review: I had no idea of how many people were involved in the evolution of Jazz music! This film, was somewhat long, but I can imagine how difficult it would be to cut down the film into a smaller time frame. Some Jazz buffs have given this film, rather harsh reviews, but I would reccomend this film to anyone who doesn't have the time to research who were the most influential bodies in Jazz at the local library. There are many other issues incorporated into this documentary, such as racism, others have said, it wasn't necessary to place this in the movie, but it very much so was. It impacted Jazz music whether people choose to accept it or not. It is also filled with many interesting and entertaining stories on the Jazz greats. So if you even have the slightest interest in jazz history, and you enjoy documentary, or if your a music history teacher, this definitely a film for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Where is the rest?
Review: Ken Burns did a great job on what he chose to cover, this is a very good documentary. But he seems to have been so concerned with building a good foundation to his movie that he forgot to finish the walls (and there is no roof!). He chose a few giants of Jazz and drilled very deep around them, providing in the process a heavily mutilated and one-sided view of what Jazz is. Burns does not seem to have the gift of synthesis, in 10 DVDs and 20 hours one would imagine that he would have had enough space to cover more territory: the recent history of Jazz, Latin Jazz, the offshoots of Jazz, etc., etc., and to articulate a more complex web of perspectives, instead of a very linear, repetitive, and should I say lazy, approach of presenting the story through interviews of the same people talking about the same topics (almost as if he gave the same cue cards to all his interviewees). Bottom line, a good documentary but well below the hype it received, Jazz deserves much better than this.
Rating:
Summary: Racist?
Review: Great intro and on up to the Swing Era but nothing past '61? Burns has snubbed the white musician (OK! Mulligan & Evans'!) post Goodman!! Absolutely no recognition for the great work of Kenton, Shorty Rogers, Billy May, Woody Herman, Don Ellis, (including their sidemen) to name a few and none for Django, Grappelli, Peggy Lee, Julie London, June Christy (oh yes, horse!) Anita O'Day, George Shearing, Jimmy Giuffre, Bobby Brookmeyer, Jim Hall, Joe Pass...God, the list goes on and on - both black and white!! Perhaps Burns has inadvertently become what he detests: the segregationist and the racist! Pretty harsh words for a series that this jazzoid was very appreciative of (at least it was done and promoted to a wide audience!). Perhaps Burns just ran out of time and so much was devoted to Pops & Duke & "the movement" that many significant contributors to the art were left out. For me, the work is incomplete and unfair. While the music's roots are black and sprang out of racism and sergregation, it became universal. It doesn't just belong the the black innovator, composer, improvisationist and hasn't for generations! He should have stopped when ahead with bebop & picked up the later generations with, perhaps, a new head of steam.
Rating:
Summary: Money-making hype and not enough substance
Review: I could not have been more disappointed with this series. Insofar as Ken Burns has joined up some interesting film clips of a number of jazz greats, it's watchable -- who isn't interested in seeing John Coltrane at full throttle, or the Miles Davis Quintet jamming? But that's it. The rest is pretty awful to sit through, actually. Point 1: Wynton Marsalis is not the only wunderkind who knows something about jazz -- why not try interviewing Nicholas Payton or Keith Jarrett or Sonny Rollins or Lee Konitz or anyone of at least a hundred musicians playing every week here in New York who are still part of the music? Wynton is great but this has not been a one-man jazz revival. Point 2: the black thing. Way overdone -- don't turn jazz into a civil rights crusade, that's not the way it was -- make a documentary about Dr. King instead. Point 3: the film is suffused with a 'cliche-ridden' view of jazz; Ken Burns has hit on all the old stories (Lady Day beating up two guys on 52nd Street, Charlie Parker at the pawn shop, Gil Evans apartment in the basement) that have been told a hundred times -- there was not one original take on these anecdotes in the whole 19 hour film. Point 5: why go for so many cliches and then completely dodge some real issues (1) homosexuality (still in the closet?!) (2) heroin. Point 4: Satchmo and the Duke were amazing; but to devote ONE episode to the last 40 years? Come on! The structure of the movie is almost an advertisement for the DEATH of jazz. I hate to say it but Ken Burns clearly made a movie about something he had very little intuition or understanding about, and it shows. Compare this with DA Pennebaker's take on Dylan or even 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' and Burn's interpretative skills have fallen way short, in comparison. Like so much else, this film has largely been a trial of STYLE over substance -- a modern disease. If you want to know or learn something, anything at all about jazz, start by buying 'Kind of Blue' or 'A Love Supreme' or 'Body and Soul'; or listen to Bill Evan's mesmerizing 'Waltz for Debby'. Don't waste your time with a pop re-hash -- you could have read all this in a music textbook.
Rating:
Summary: So, Jazz ended in 1960?
Review: Very disappointing- basically an advancement of the Wynton Marsalis position, apparently now shared by Burns, that any jazz after bebop sucks or simply does not exist. Perhaps more appropriately called the 'origins of jazz', it is quite complete in this relm, providing interesting historical background but really only in a didactic fashion, without the gripping emotional engagement that 'Baseball' and 'Civil War' seemed to offer. (Baseball is among my favorite documentary films) Watching Burns attempt (poorly) to scat sing almost made me physically ill. Marsalis' comments are without any real substance (and his scat singing isn't much better and far too frequent) and the many of the other interviewees, mainly writers and critics, are essentially vacant talking heads, providing little or no insight into the truth behind the music. Much of it was critical conjecture, or, in the case of Wynton, pointless 'arguments from authority' about what amounted to in the end - nothing. While jazz certainly has its historical roots in black culture, the impression given is that all this was going on in the background and most whites were supressing it. While this very well may have been true in the beginning, I'd say that it is a fair statement that, global-cultural issues aside, jazz as it is practiced today (and pretty much since the '60s) is well integrated. Other than very brief laundry-list mentions I heard no real review of any of the modern big bands (Kenton, Ferguson, Grunz, Hermann's transitional Herds), the important fusion bands (Weather Report primarily), or even any of the truly important modern small-combo players (Jarrett trio, Motian, Garbarek, Wheeler, Frisell) basically ignoring 'third stream' music wholesale. Forget about seeing any of the 'softer' players (Metheny) or wildly experimental (Braxton, Zorn). One bright spot was a few moments with Charlie Haden about his time with Ornette. Sadly, I got the impression that Ornette was treated as more of a novelty than as a serious molding force in jazz. No extensive mention of any album other than Free Jazz... As a long-time union-card carrying jazz musician (and son and brother of far greater accomplished jazz musicians to boot) I was sorely disappointed with the series. This is about as far from 'Baseball' as I thought it could get. Rent it, fast forward through it, spend the money you would have spent on a good collection of recordings throughout the -entire- history of jazz and see for yourself. You'll be amazed how much is missing from Burns' work.
Rating: 
Summary: Thank you, Ken Burns
Review: Thank you, Ken Burns, for making this film. It is hard to comprehend the mean-spiritedness of some of Mr. Burns's critics on this site and in other reviews that I have read. According to them, "Jazz" is terrible because: 1) It pays too much attention to the "great men" of jazz, like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Why is this so surprising to people? If Ken Burns made a film about 20th century American novelists, would people complain that he paid too much attention to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway? Every field of artistic endeavour has its acknowledged giants, and if you don't already understand why Louis Armstrong is one of the giants of jazz, you will after you watch this film. I would have paid the entire price of all 10 DVDs just for the 3-minute film clip of Armstrong performing "I Cover the Waterfront" from 1933. This performance confirms the point that several of the commentators in the film make - Louis Armstrong was arguably both the greatest instrumentalist AND the greatest vocalist in the history of American music. I defy anyone who has any interest in any kind of music to watch this performance and not have their jaw drop twice: first, at the moment Louis begins to sing, and second, at the moment he picks up his trumpet and begins to play. 2) It leaves out [fill in the blank], a neglected avant-garde player, who advanced jazz after 1960 by [fill in the blank]. Just as Burns' film about the Civil War was not aimed at Civil War buffs who spend their free time re-enacting the battle of Gettysburg, "Jazz" is not aimed at jazz addicts who spend their free time arguing about whether Wayne Shorter's solo recording of "Footprints" is better than the version on "Miles Smiles". "Jazz" is aimed at the general public, who might be interested in learning more about the music, but don't know where to begin. I became interested in jazz after moving to Mississippi and listening to the blues non-stop for several years, but I didn't know where or how to begin listening to jazz. I bought "A Love Supreme" and "Live at the Village Vanguard" by John Coltrane, because he was one of the few jazz artists I had ever heard of. Like many people who have leaped straight from rock into Trane, I suspect, I was intially turned off by how complicated and "weird" these records sounded, and I didn't buy any more jazz records for a long time. I can't tell you how much I wish I had been able to see a film like "Jazz" back then, so that I could have understood how the music got from Armstrong to swing to bop to "Kind of Blue" to the music Trane was playing in the 60s. Like many others, I had to slowly figure it out for myself. For people in my generation (I grew up in the 70s and 80s) jazz was off the radar of mainstream American culture - we were never exposed to it in school, we never heard it on the radio, and we never saw documentaries like "Jazz" on television. If one elementary school student watches "Jazz" in his classroom and gets turned on to Charlie Parker or Miles Davis instead of Pearl Jam or Britney Spears, Ken Burns will have accomplished something wonderful. I am sure that tens of thousands of children and adults will develop a life-long appreciation for jazz by being exposed to this film. Burns's film is not perfect, but what is? I just know that it almost made me fall out of my chair to see actual live footage of one of my heroes, Clifford Brown, playing his trumpet. It made me run to the record store and buy records by musicians that I had not been exposed to, like Sarah Vaughan, or had ignorantly dismissed as square, like Benny Goodman. It made me cry to see Louis Armstrong walk out on stage at the end of his life against his doctor's orders and make people as happy with his music as he had fifty years earlier. Thank you, Ken Burns.
Rating:
Summary: Ken Burns does not know anything about JAZZ!
Review: I don't understand... Why do people love this film so much? You get a bunch old clips and pictures then some really meaningless comment repeatly throughout the whole thing. Is this call documentary? Is this really what people want? There's no discussion about the evolution of the Jazz... There's no discussion about the true spirit of Jazz... All I hear is "This guy is great, that guy is a genius" and bunch of meaningless comments! And they totally ignore and trashed one of the most important period in Jazz history. If you are a true Jazz fan, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you are not a Jazz fan yet, avoid this at all cost! This film will mislead you to the history of Jazz! A good jazz documentary film I recommend: Ron Mann -- Imagining the Sound
Rating:
Summary: Only a partial look at jazz in America, but a great start
Review: It's incredibly hard for anyone let alone Ken Burn's to try and package the complete history of jazz. This 10 part mini-series attempts to do that and in some respects does, but jazz is just to big to get it all in. As some other reviews here have said, the later episodes become very disjointed. The last episode unfortunately tries to do too much. Having had those negative feelings though does not make this a bad series. Seeing the photo of the little boy in Jackson Square playing the trumpet in the last episode sums it up better than words ever could. This series, incomplete as it may be, is a chance for the music to gain a whole new group of followers. Maybe a few kids will see it and want to pick up a horn. ...and to a previous review...His name IS Louis, not Louie and he is the most important figure in Jazz. Come to New Orleans if you don't believe me.
|
