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Hi All. I thought I'd send this in as sort of food for thought (and comment). A good friend of mine who is a jazz drummer sent it to me. It's written by another friend who's a fairly visible music journalist. Please no flame wars. The opinions contained herein are not neccessarily mine to begin with (althought I share a similar view on some points). Have fun, T.Killian ________________________________________________________ By Josef Woodard KEN BURNS JAZZ, ROYALLY: This just in: jazz, it turns out, is dead. The fact was duly reported by Ken Burns’s 10-part PBS documentary, called, with encyclopedic sweep, JAZZ. Apparently, jazz reached an early apex, in the feel-good throes of the Swing Era. Then, corruptive influences spoiled the party, including heroin (the program is careful to index those musicians who used the stuff) and a protracted period of confusion, from 1960-2000, which barely even deserves mentioning, let alone chronicling. Thankfully, in the early ’80s, the young wonder, suit-donning Wynton Marsalis, came along to save the music, with chops aplenty and a fierce reactionary bent, sniffing at the guises of fusion, avant-garde, or anything that didn’t suit his shamelessly antiquarian biases about the music (Marsalis, like Ken Burns, is a necrophiliac, saddened by having been born too late). That’s the story of JAZZ. And it’s an unconscionable crock. The infamous finale of JAZZ, in which roughly half of this great music’s evolution was scorned and many of its most important elements patently ignored, screened last week. At the IAJE conference in NYC in January, coproducer Lynn Novick appeared in a panel discussion on JAZZ (Burns was too battle-weary to show his face). She fended off frustrations about the program’s myopia by asking us to suspend judgment until we’d seen the controversial episode. We have seen it and are more incensed than expected. We have seen the sleazy docu-tactics in attempting to discredit the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Cecil Taylor “pettily sneered at by Gene Lees and Branford Marsalis” and how they dismiss Miles Davis’s hugely influential electric period out-of-hand, as if an outgrowth of Miles’s lust for fans and goofy clothes. JAZZ patently ignores important jazz musicians from the ’70s and beyond, including John McLaughlin, Weather Report, and Pat Metheny, who may be the most significant living jazz musician in terms of straddling many worlds. They inexcusably gloss over Keith Jarrett, one of the giants of the current scene (and, it should be noted, a foe of the show’s puppeteer Marsalis clan). We have seen how, in one laughable sequence, they tried to quickly survey current artists, flashing still shots under a Cassandra Wilson vamp that even she would admit has little to do with jazz. In short, Burns, et al. amplify their contempt for anything after, and much before, Coltrane’s death in 1967. The final episode is a blight, which negates the virtues of the project’s earlier segments, and certainly the most infuriatingly imbalanced, culturally suspicious program ever screened on PBS. We need to start a letter campaign to the irresponsible parties. Warning, before we go any further: this column may be tainted. It’s being penned by one of those “jazz critics” who Burns repeatedly claims (even in a pathetic post-show appearance by the mop-top marauder) are an insignificant, elitist minority finding fault in his efforts. He’s badly mistaken. Jazz lovers take their music seriously, not as an idle diversion, and we’re not amused when half the music’s history is casually slandered. Burns, ignorant about jazz, but intrigued by its narrative possibilities (think of the archival imagery!), apparently fell under the spell of the notorious charmer and arch-conservative Wynton Marsalis and his sidekick Stanley Crouch. Somebody neglected to alert Burns to the dark side of his advisors’ agenda, that, in fact, they want to kill the progressive spirit of jazz and turn it into a museum piece. Then there’s also the carpet-bagger factor to consider. Burns is a good filmmaker, and has also learned a trick rare in the parallel universe of documentary-making — turning a tidy profit. Through profits on albums, books, T-shirts, whatever, Burns stands to rake in more lucre than most jazz musicians would make in two lifetimes. And, in a sense, he knows less about jazz than when he started. What the Marsalis mafia failed to impart on him is that, yes, jazz is America’s great music, and it’s very much alive and kicking and evolving, right under Burnsalis.