Filmmaker Ken Burns first entered the American consciousness in 1990 when The Civil War, his monumental documentary of that defining period in our history became the highest rated program in public television history with over 40 million viewers. That record was broken four years later with the premiere of Burns’ Baseball, a nine part look at our National Pastime, which drew 45 million viewers. Those numbers will surely be surpassed in January of next year when, over a four week period, Burns turns his formidable talents to a ten part 18 1/2 hour examination of jazz.
He talked recently to OffBeat about the project from the studios of Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. Burns began by discussing how jazz fits in the larger context of those two previous films:
I see Jazz as the final chapter in a trilogy of films that have occupied more than 16 years of my professional life. The easiest way to describe it is to say that in the introduction to the Baseball film there is an interview with Gerald Early, a distinguished writer and essayist, and he says that 2000 years from now when they study this civilization there will be only three things that Americans will be noted for, the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. At first that puts a smile on our face, but on closer reflection, and in thinking about the whole scope of American history we begin to realize that the American genius is at its heart an improvisational one. The Constitution is four pieces of parchment paper written at the end of the 18th century which is able to adjudicate the most complicated problems.
At the beginning of the 21st century we know that baseball is a simple children’s stick and ball game which has infinite, chess-like combinations, and we all know at the heart of the most important art form ever invented by Americans, jazz, is improvisation. I dealt with the Constitution’s severest test in our Civil War series. In that series Shelby Foote says that the Civil War defined us. If you are curious about what we became out of the Civil War, it would be possible to follow the political narrative of wars and generals and presidents, but I felt the world of baseball offered a more complete way to understand the kind of country we had become since that defining moment of the Civil War. Jazz, I feel, though it is a look backwards into the 20th century, is in a way a look at the redemptive future promise of America, because embedded in the perfection of jazz is all that we might become as Americans. So though the subject seems so incongruous, to me they are a thorough line of coming to grips with this question of who we are as Americans .
When you were interviewed here in New Orleans [at the International Association of Jazz Educators Conference in January] you gave a thumbnail sketch of each of the ten episodes. It was quite a surprise to many when they heard that bebop is introduced in episode seven, and episode 10 covers 1960 to the present. Although I personally might have been cheering, there seemed to be concern in the room. What do you say to those who might question where you put emphasis?
I think those people who are intimately involved in the jazz world will find that we have left out a great many people, and movements, and types of music. I want to apologize in advance for that. But it was a conscious and intentional decision to do so. The last thing I wanted to make was an encyclopedia of the history of jazz; they exist. What I wanted to do was a narrative story that drinks in the history of jazz and that necessarily requires a greater emphasis on the early years, and the middle years, than in the later years. I consider the later years no less important, but more the province of journalism. History itself, the making of history, requires a certain kind of triangulation to take place, and the essential ingredient in that triangulation is distance from the subject, something we don’t have in the modern era. So I quite consciously decided, as I did in my Baseball series, to come up to the present, to have the last episode cover, like the first episode, a huge amount of time.
The first episode in the Jazz series is called “Gumbo” and it goes from the early 1800s to 1917 when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band makes the first recording of jazz. The last episode, which is called “A Masterpiece by Midnight,” goes from 1960 to the present. But it takes a much more impressionistic view because we are still in the throes, in both the journalistic and historical way, of trying to come to grips with what’s going on. It is possible therefore to shed light on, to me, the central important chapters of jazz that begin with its New Orleans roots and travels with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and others, into swing and its mass acceptance, the movement of bebop and many of the other schools that popped up in the wake of [Charlie] Parker’s startling advances. So I don’t think we’ve done an incomplete history, it’s just not comprehensive; it’s not encyclopedic. So there will be people left out. When you’re in the middle of editing, you’re in process, trying to shape and form an episode and series, sometimes chapters that are absolutely thrilling get taken out in support of the larger narrative being cohesive.
There is one more important point to make, jazz music in the late ’30 and early ’40s, jazz and swing, represented 70 percent of the profits of the music industry. Now jazz accounts for significantly less than three percent. I, as a film maker and amateur historian, am aiming at a wide general audience, and what I want to do is give those Americans who have perhaps forgotten about the music that is at the soul of their country a chance to reexamine it. I don’t wish this to be the definitive last statement on jazz but a kind of way for Americans to be re-introduced to it. So my objective throughout was to get that little old lady in Dubuque to tap her toes as much as a jazz expert.
The great excitement I have is meeting people who know a lot about jazz and they love it. We have a board of advisors that reads like a “Who’s Who” across the spectrum of jazz scholarship and commentary. For every Wynton Marsalis or Stanley Crouch, we have a Gary Giddins. Gary and Wynton are on camera more than anyone else. What we steadfastly refused to do was to get into the arguments of jazz. I am mostly not interested in race, so those who think that jazz has been too much racialized will probably be disappointed. I think that jazz is African American music, and I think its no coincidence that it was founded by African Americans who had to improvise a hell of a lot more than most Americans because they had the experience of being unfree in a free land. Necessarily, the question of jazz is going to deal with race. As Wynton Marsalis says, more articulately than anyone else and to the surprise of others, this is about creativity. It doesn’t matter what your color is. If you can play that’s all that matters. So finally what you are dealing with is the anatomy of an art form in which race necessarily gets brought up because we are a country that hasn’t been able to deal with race. That’s why I go back to the answer to your first question: at the end Jazz is about the redemptive future possibility of our country, because it is utterly color-blind.
I understand your predicament in people taking issue with what is included and not included. I was at your speech here in New Orleans in the wake of the Civil War series, and when it was time for questions, it seemed like every one in the room was clutching a bunch of papers, waving them around, and saying “Why didn’t you use my family letters?!”
Well you have to understand that I’m a fairly recognized personality, and my nightmare joke is people stopping me in airports, coming up in a very excited fashion and saying “I can’t wait for Jazz, what are you doing on Seattle jazz?” And although the city of Seattle has a very vibrant jazz scene, I have to say to them “not a damn thing,” because it’s not my position to do that. However, the final episode does introduce the complicated and difficult music of Charles Mingus intertwining with politics. It has Miles [Davis] moving towards his most satisfying work and into fusion, his most controversial. It has the death of Armstrong, the death of Ellington, the return of Dexter Gordon.
Episode 10 samples many different tributaries of jazz and then looks back and tries to see where we’ve been. So it’s an episode that’s doing a hell of a lot, but it will have left out things, just as every other episode has left out many tangential and very worthy subjects. It’s just a question of when your heart begins to gravitate to one subject over another. One scenario begins to suggest how it is, and some things become extraneous not because they’re not important, not because they’re not good. I want to stress that most of what’s on the cutting room floor is excellent, it’s just that there are, if you remember the movie Amadeus, too many notes.
How long did this project take you?
I’ve been working on this film for six years. I remember a moment in the very beginning of my work on the Baseball series when I realized I was working on a trilogy, and wondering to myself what was the third leg and jazz music popped up in my head. Coincidentally, a few weeks later I did the interview with Gerald Early, and it stayed in my head. But it wasn’t until I began to use jazz to inform many of the middle episodes, the middle innings, of Baseball that I began to feel in my heart and in my gut that was the direction I needed to go in. When Baseball was broadcast in the fall of 1994 I remember sitting in my living room with some co-workers and friends and my kids and saying “jazz, that’s what I have to do.” As I confessed in New Orleans at that time my CD collection had maybe one jazz title in it, and today I would have trouble finding a non-jazz CD in my collection. This could be looked at in two ways: one the glass is half empty and you have some amateur coming in and doing a jazz history, but if the glass is half full, you have someone who has shared his heartfelt discovery of America’s music with his countrymen.
For me, that’s what has been the most satisfying since I began listening to jazz, the discovery, because there is such a vast body of recorded music out there. One record leads you to another, and another and it almost seems endless.
I like to describe myself as an emotional archaeologist. I didn’t know anything about the Civil War, I then went and found out, same with Jazz. Rather than make my films an expression of an already arrived at conclusion, I try to make them an expression of our process of discovery and discovery is nearly always joyous, even when you are uncovering tragedy. Making things complicated doesn’t diminish the subject, so that this is a series not just about jazz, you have to understand that jazz is merely the delivery vehicle. So that you can also say that this is a film about race, and race relations, and prejudice. It is a film about wars, two world wars. It is a film about a great depression. It is a film about sex, and the relationship between men and women. It is a film about drugs and their terrible cost and price. It is a film about the growth and decay of cities. But at its heart, this is a film about creativity, and specifically American creativity. So jazz really becomes a vessel into which one can pour questions about who we are in many areas that stretch beyond jazz, just as I think you know from being familiar with the Baseball series that it isn’t just about games one and lost, just as the Civil War wasn’t just about who won and who lost, who died and who survived.
You called yourself an “Emotional Archaeologist.” On your “digs” did you unearth some musician or music that made you think “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?”
It’s hard for me to answer, because anyone I mention will hardly seem obscure. Being completely ignorant of jazz going in, everybody was a revelation and a discovery. I knew, if we had been having this conversation six years ago, who the top guys were, but I couldn’t begin to tell you why they were important. For me the discovery of the complexity of Fletcher Henderson, and his later relationship with Benny Goodman is one thing, and Charlie Christian just blows me away. I think Clifford Brown is one of the most tragic stories we have to tell, because we see in him so much protean promise and you wonder “What if?” Every chapter is filled with people, so at the end of the day I’m as excited to talk about Frankie Trumbauer or Sweets Edison as I am to talk about Armstrong and Ellington.
You’ve mentioned Armstrong several times. I’ve found in listening to his music and poring over his writings, his letters and even in talking to people who met the man, that he does not seem of this earth. In New Orleans you called him the “heart and soul of the film.” What effect did he have not only on the series, but on you personally?
The key is what you just said, that he is not of this earth. We did upwards of 100 interviews for the series and 75, which is a terrific record, appear in the film. Of those, more than half had something to say about Armstrong. Every single one of them, whether it was a critic, or a writer, or an historian, a musician who played with him or a musician now struggling to come to terms with his legacy, whether it was a fan or a family friend, to a person they spoke of him as if he was a gift from God, or an angel. I’d have to say there is really no other way to come to terms with Armstrong, other than to say that he was the person “chosen” to bring the message of jazz to America. I’m quoting Wynton Marsalis here because I don’t know of any better way to say it. He is not only, obviously, the first great protean genius of the music, who changed all of the music, I’d like to say that Armstrong is to music, I’m not saying jazz, he is to music what Einstein is to physics, what Freud is to medicine and what the Wright Brothers are to travel. You’re dealing with someone who exponentially transformed the art form not once but twice. He did it with instrumental playing, and he did it again with his singing and did so in a way that broke all the rules and created a whole new set of possibilities on which jazz has been practiced ever since. Even when people are getting away from Armstrong they are still in relationship to him. So there is no one more central to jazz music than Louis Armstrong. We have the added complexity of this being a man whose heart is bigger than almost anyone else I’ve come across in my years and years of study of American history. So we have a person whose heart brings with it this incredible message of love. That’s, finally, the only thing you can say. And this is a powerful combination, and it also gets him into trouble because he is seen in various ages to have a minstrel kind of dimension, which is disquieting to many African Americans in the ’50s and ’60s who are clamoring for civil rights. Yet paradoxically Armstrong is the only jazz entertainer of any note in the ’50s who’s canceling tours to the Soviet Union because of Little Rock and the inability of the Eisenhower administration to deal effectively with civil rights. Armstrong has layers, and layers, and layers. The most important thing is that the music sounds as fresh today as it did in 1926, ’27, ’28, the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, I mean some of those pieces can change your life, your day, your moment now as they did for people back then. It’s very simple really, he changes one’s molecules. When I see the “Dinah” footage [filmed in Denmark in 1933], it’s like seeing e=MC2 on a blackboard written in the hand of Einstein. One begins to suspect, when studying his life, that this is some sort of “Human Gift.” I know that in politics allmost every American can look back and say “we needed Abraham Lincoln to come along when he came along, and the sacrifice that he made for his country was beyond belief.” There is something spiritual, and otherworldly about it. I know that was my case. Well, if you gave me a choice right now of being able to have lunch with Abraham Lincoln or Louis Armstrong, I’d have lunch with Louis Armstrong, because Armstrong’s contribution is no less important to the future character of the Republic. We can say Lincoln saved the Union, but what kind of Union does one save if you don’t have a Louis Armstrong there to remind us how to swing?
