Product Description

JAZZ is a ten-part nearly nineteen-hour documentary series that celebrates America's greatest original art form a music whose improvisational spirit perfectly reflects the nation that gave it birth. It is the first television series ever to tell the story of jazz. Beginning with the birth of jazz at the dawn of the Twentieth Century the film incorporates the wide range of American culture and historical events that interact directly with the music: among them the harsh racial polarization of the 1890s; the artistic and political ferment of the Harlem Renaissance; the exuberance of the Jazz Age; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the Second World War; the emergence of a youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s; the hope anger and expectations of the civil rights movement; and the search for identity and authenticity in the 1970s 1980s and 1990s.DVD Features: Featurette: "Making of Jazz"Additional Scenes: Three full length performances not seen in the filmPlaylist information for over 500 songs Music and Photo creditsSystem Requirements: Running Time 1140 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. UPC: 841887051255 Manufacturer No: 705125

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9067 in DVD
• Brand: KEN BURNS' JAZZ (DVD MOVIE)
• Released on: 2004-09-28
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 10
• Dimensions: 1.85 pounds
• Running time: 1140 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Accompanied by a menagerie of products, Ken Burns's expansive 10-episode paean, Jazz, completes his trilogy on American culture, following The Civil War and Baseball. Spanning more than 19 hours, Jazz is, of course, about a lot more than what many have called America's classical music--especially in episodes 1 through 7. It's here that Burns unearths precious visual images of jazz musicians and hangs historical narratives around the music with convincing authority. Time can stand still as images float past to the sound of grainy vintage jazz, and the drama of a phonograph needle being placed on Louis Armstrong's celestial "West End Blues" is nearly sublime.

The film is also potent in arguing that the history of race in the 20th-century U.S. is at jazz's heart. But a few problems arise. First is Burns's reliance on Wynton Marsalis as his chief musical commentator. Marsalis might be charming and musically expert, but he's no historian. For the film to devote three of its episodes to the 1930s, one expects a bit more historical substance. Also, Jazz condenses the period of 1961 to the present into one episode, glossing over some of the music's giant steps. Burns has said repeatedly that he didn't know much about jazz when he began this project. So perhaps Jazz, for all its glory, would better be called Jazz: What I've Learned Since I Started Listening (And I Haven't Gotten Much Past 1961). For those who are already passionate about jazz, the film will stoke debate (and some derision, together with some reluctant praise). But for everyone else, it will amaze and entertain and kindle a flame for some of the greatest music ever dreamed. --Andrew Bartlett

DVD features
The DVD version of Jazz offers a "music information" mode, in which the title of a song is displayed when it is played in the film. Pressing the Title button jumps the viewer out of the film to a screen that lists that song's composer, performers (including all band members, not just the headliner), year of recording, and album and record company information when applicable (and no, all the credits are not to the series' own CDs). Another click of the Title button returns the viewer to the film. When music information mode is turned off, song titles are not displayed but the Title button still accesses the song credits. Each DVD's scene-selection menu lists only the 10 subchapters, but in fact each song is individually tracked (50 to 80 tracks per DVD).

The DVD set also includes three full-length performances not seen in the film: Louis Armstrong's "I Cover the Waterfront" from 1933, Duke Ellington's "C Jam Blues" from 1942, and Miles Davis's "New Rhumba" from 1959. Finally, the 16-minute documentary "Making of Jazz" provides insight into the production of the film. Ken Burns and producer Lynn Novick (who both admit their lack of musical training) discuss their process of researching and collecting materials, Wynton Marsalis mentions how he suggested to Burns the topic of jazz after the trumpeter became a fan of The Civil War, and narrator Keith David is shown recording his lines. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

Ken Burns' Hyperbole Jazz
I saw some of this series when it first came out on PBS, and now I'm seeing it again, having finished "The Gift" up to this point. Frankly, I don't know how much more of it I can take.

The subject matter is fine, but the amount of gushing hyperbole from the Talking Heads is close to unbearable. I suppose it's perfectly OK to be enthusiastic about something, but such total lack of restraint renders anything they have to say suspect; there's no judgment here, no sense of balance.

I teach a music appreciation class at a large university, and if there's one thing I've learned about effective teaching over the years, it is to refrain from telling your students how they're supposed to feel or react. Don't go around telling them that Mozart is a Great Composer and therefore they are supposed to feel ecstatic or moved or whatever when they hear Mozart. Present Mozart -- with affection, however much or little you can in the time you have, and let them make up their own minds.

But that's precisely what these talking heads -- and presumably Ken Burns -- absolutely refuse to do. They tell me what I'm supposed to feel or think about these figures in question. By their careless tossing around of hyperbolic phrases, overstatements, and ridiculously pompous pontificating, they leech out a great deal of the value of the subject.

Which is truly a shame, given that the subject is a truly engaging one, or can be. The series contains a wealth of images and recordings -- longer music examples would have been good but the accompanying CD set helps to ameliorate that problem.

I would rate Giddins as hands down the most irritating of the bunch (smug pomposity), with Marsalis coming in a close second; despite his musical credentials, he just didn't have any business handing down his seemingly endless series of ex cathedra statements.

Ken Burns didn't S#@8 about jazz when he did this and it shows
My main issue is that Wynton suggested after seeing Civil Wars and Baseball that Burns should do a series about the only truly American art for that being Jazz (or black music from field hollers to blues etc).Wynton is sort of neo-con about jazz and I am not into totally free jazz or commercial fusion or jazz light.I agree that the innovations after 1964 into atonal free jazz or more akin to avant garde classical like Schoeneberg or Cage.But when covering be-bop into the important "New Thing" that fit politics and culture of time iot was like "Coltrane and Miles had gone into modal jazz but newer ,younger players started an avant garde "New Thing....but wait in 1964 Louis Armstrong had his last big hit with "Hello Dolly".All of the critics were referred to Burns by Marsallis or the themes and emphasis were his own as Burns didn't know what to do but photo research.You've heard this I am sure but in case you haven't there it is.I think Armstrong (and actually Bechet before him to lesser degree) revolutionized everything with the solo in jazz and he and Ellington then Bird and Diz,Monk,and Miles and Trane were the main figures.But jazz is so rich from post beatles avante-garde,the Loft Scene,European players and critics that for as long as it was many voices were left out and that's a shame.
Peace
Chazz

"A" for Entertainment, "C-" for History
Ken Burns is an effective filmakeer; if only he were an effective historian! Jazz is a deeply flawed project. The rise of recorded sound and the mass media compressed the history of Jazz. In less than a century, Jazz has seen as many movements/counter-movements and revolutionary outbursts as art or classical music saw over many centuries, but in Jazz, movements last years, not decades, and what was considered "radical" in 1945 was "traditional" or even "old hat" by 1960. Yet this rich tug of war between sub-genres is almost entirely absent in Burns' work.

Because Burns is not a trained musician, he relied on others to flesh out the idiom's history for him. In choosing Wynton Marsalis as his cultural beacon, he inadvertently chose by far one of the most conservative voices in Jazz. Mr. Marsalis is a formidable musician, but many in Jazz dispute his very narrow outlook on the art. In Mr. Marsalis' world, the only "real" jazz is blues infused. Blues is indeed a powerful component of jazz, but the 12 bar alternation of the three chords (I,IV and V) is just one of a panoply of styles. Styles that don't fall into Marsalis' limited stylistic orbit are either completely ignored in Burns' work, or dismissed as the peripheral musical ravings of a hack.

Burns' film only covers some aspects of Jazz from 1900 to 1961. It's like telling the story of Classical music but stopping short with Brahms, blithely ignoring anything that came after 1890, sweeping the huge burst of creativity that followed under the cultural carpet. Just as the history of classical music cannot ignore towering 20th figures such as Mahler, Stravinsky, Sehoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Copland, Shostokovich, Cage and others, a huge multi-part history of Jazz should not stop abruptly at 1961.

Just like a conservative telling of classical music (where Bach, Beethoven and Brahms rule over all) we are given cultural pantheons, most notably Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, while others, even remarkable revolutionaries, are ignored or denigrated.

Mr. Armstrong is indeed a powerful and influential figure in Jazz. He pretty much invented vocal "scat" and his early "Hot 5s and 7s" recordings are powerful statements of a folk tradition morphing beyond it's roots into a sophisticated art form. But Mr. Armstrong's influence waned, indeed one could argue died entirely, with the advent of "bebop" in the early 1940s. bebop is more complex harmonicially, replacing the simple chord progressions of the Blues with free-ranging progressions of dozens of chords, pushing the bounds of tonality with "substitution chords," rapid fire and complex improvisation, and chromatic flights of fancy.

Burns' romantic portrayal of Jazz masks what was often a very cantankerous battle among various factions. Mr. Armstrong passionately hated bebop. The practitioners of bebop, Charlie "Bird" Parker and othes, disdained in turn what they saw as the pedantic "moldy figs" of Armstrong's older generation. Ultimately, bebop tugged at tonality as aggressively as the late 19th century classical composers, and like in the classical traditional, it paved the way for a great tonal/atonal divide.

But in Mr. Burns' film its as if the tremendous atonal earthquake brought forth on the album "Free Jazz" never happened. The album was as influential as the huge controversy that greeted Igor Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" in the classical genre. One can love or hate it, but one cannot ignore it. The battles music fans engaged in when John Coltrane embraced atonality with his album "Ascension" are lost on the Burns/Marselis collective imagination. Eric Dolphy's monumental "Out to Lunch" is...well...out to lunch in this miniseries. In Mr. Burns world of gentle jazz, there is little room for radicals.

But in the real world, the split between tonality and atonality shook Jazz to its core for decades. Musicians coming of age in the 1960s through the early 1990s, whether self-taught or emerging from colleges, universities and conservatories, would chose one of two pathways. On one side of the cultural fork, they could chose the tonal, blues and big band infused "inside" or "in" path, or they could opt for the more adventurous atonal, avant garde, "outside" or "out" path. For Jazz, this was *the* civil war. Mr. Burns film doesn't allow for civil wars; indeed, often the music comes off as gentle parlor music, approachable even to the most gentle ears.

Over time, the "out" path became linked to the cultural notion of Black Power. The American Academy of Colored Music (AACM) in Chicago issued manifestos reminiscent of those that radicals in the art movement put forth in early 20th Century Europe. The only true African American music, for the AACM, was "out" and aggressively so. They called for a rejection of classically influenced (and thus "white") tonality.

The inevitable influence of Rock and electronic music on Jazz doesn't exist in the Burns/Marsalis landscape. "Bitches Brew," which fused elements of "in", "out" and rock on a two album release that was, for a time, the darling of thousands of young teenagers who'd never listened to the blues, or to big band. The movement it spawned, Fusion, is not here either. Weather Report and other groups commited the cultural sin of mixing "pure" jazz with "polluted" rock. There is no place for them in Mr. Marsalis' world, and hence no place for them in Mr. Burns' documentary. Nor, it seems, is there room for important and emerging asian or latin american stylists, and fuggetabout "Acid Jazz," where hip hop, rap and jazz come together in exciting and suprising ways.

Perhaps the deepest iniquity we must endure with Burns' documentary is the "museum-ification" of Jazz. Jazz is a living art, indeed, many would argue that a new generation of young musicians are engaging today in an historic and lively dialog on both the tonal and atonal paths. But living musicians, such as Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Don Byron and Dave Holland do not appear. Jazz is presented by Burns as a dead art; we only hear from the dead musicians, even in the final episode. That does little to encourage increased exploration of LIVING musicians pracicing a LIVING art.

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