[78-L] Lost Chords vs. different genes

[warren moorman]

I am given to understand that Burns undertook "Jazz' partly in response to some activists' unhappiness with what they felt was too little exposition of blacks' roles in Civil War history, in his documentary on that subject. He admitted at the outset of production for "Jazz" that he was not as personally astute about it as some of his other subjects, and thus depended more heavily on the advisors to help shape his narrative. He has also received similar criticism for his relatively scant inclusion of Native American history in his previous projects "Lewis & Clark" and "The West".     

Rather than expound on the ways that Burns sometimes reveals a conciousness common in those whose notions were shaped by their distance from the everyday interactions of their subjects, one can pick up on Cary's point about the music's history being an older, more complex process than the label "jazz" permits. Musical ripoff seems to belong mostly in the category of ECONOMIC history. For me, the larger story of racial aspects in American MUSICAL history is the crossover of instruments and techniques, wherein European derived instrumentation and harmony was taken to wonderful new places by African-Americans, and African instruments and polyrhythms were developed in new ways by white musicians. The group with the most valid grievance about cultural devaluation are Native Americans, where apart from Don Pullen and a few others, precious few top modern jazzmen have made serious efforts at exploration (and not just modal pseudo-explorations).

Warren      

--- On Mon, 4/13/09, soundthink at aol.com <soundthink at aol.com> wrote:

> From: soundthink at aol.com <soundthink at aol.com>
> Subject: Re: [78-L] Lost Chords vs. different genes
> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
> Date: Monday, April 13, 2009, 8:04 AM
> Exactly my thoughts. I never suggested that jazz was
> primarily an invention of whites. That would be as
> ridiculous as what Marsalis et. al. claimed. What I was
> saying is that Burns laid ALL of the credit on blacks for
> initiating and developing jazz, while white musicians
> followed along like obedient puppies, ripping them off, and
> reaping the greater financial rewards. If you go back to
> ragtime (which you must, in order to grasp the history
> accurately), you will see black and white ragtime
> songwriters together. Music dissemination in America is much
> too complex to say anything categorically, but Burns thought
> that would make a better story. The worst kind of historian
> is the one who has a theory and goes out to prove it, rather
> than make the facts dictate the history. Burns has done some
> remarkable work, but I think he was out of his league when
> he did "Jazz" and let Marsalis, Crouch, and Murray
> lead him in the myopic direction they have perpetuated in
> their teachings. 
> 
> Incidentally, I went to see Burns give an address in
> Thousand Oaks last month. The subject of "Jazz"
> never came up, but I found him to be intelligent,
> insightful, open to alternate viewpoints, and possessing of
> a good sense of humor. So, hopefully, by now he realizes
> that he was misled, but without speaking to this subject
> specifically, I could not tell.
> 
> Cary Ginell