[78-L] Burns rebuff

[soundthink at aol.com]

This appears to be more of a rebuff against Burns/Marsalis's view that jazz died with John Coltrane and is irrelevant in today's world than with his views on the origins and early development of jazz.

Cary Ginell


April 20, 2009
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'ICONS AMONG US'

Another Documentary, Another Riff on the History and Mystery of Jazz

By BEN RATLIFF
“Icons Among Us,” a four-part series beginning Monday on the Documentary Channel, serves as a retort to Ken Burns’s 2001 television documentary “Jazz.” It doesn’t make this explicit, but it doesn’t need to. There’s no other elephant in the room.

Mr. Burns’s series, you may remember, outlined styles and eras and individual accomplishments. His film — with a narrator supplying context and imposing historical judgments — attempted to tell the story from the music’s beginning. He put forth a big extra-musical idea: jazz is the music of sophisticated Americans coming to terms with their country’s sickness about race. And he did not bother much with current trends, putting all of jazz since 1960, more or less, inside its final episode.

When Mr. Burns’s documentary came out, some viewers protested the way he seemed to shine up jazz’s past at the expense of its present. This new film strikes a vague blow for those dissenters. In many ways “Icons Among Us” is starkly anti-Burnsian. It suggests jazz more as a philosophical ideal — “a reflection of20what life could be,” in the guitarist Bill Frisell’s on-camera words, “where there’s infinite possibilities, and no one gets hurt” — and less as a particular sound or tradition. It’s mostly about musicians currently under 50. It has a lot of time for jazz that’s basically pop: specifically, jam-band music or hip-hop. It presents jazz musicians as gifted but down-to-earth people, not demigods. And it’s extra-wary about the tyranny of the past.

The first onscreen opinion comes from the trumpeter Nicholas Payton. “You have to let go of everything you’ve seen and heard to experience the truth,” he says. “A lie is anything that has nothing to do with now. Truth is now.”

He’s talking about improvising, but he’s also supplying this undogmatic film — the first two episodes of it, anyway — with a thesis. If you want to understand jazz, it seems to suggest, start with the present, or maybe the last 15 years, and then go backward. Listen to the old masters, but only up to a point. Never lose track of yourself, your time, your world; otherwise you’ll be an anxious blob, mainlining Blue Note records from 1959 and making irrelevant music.

The pianist Matthew Shipp gets off some funny, sparky lines about maintaining creativity under the weight of the past. He blasphemes Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett and Bud Powell, even though it’s clear he loves them. That’s fine, but at a certain poi
nt the viewer wants storytelling based in musical detail: about what, specifically, jazz is trying to do now, who’s making its important work, how it has changed.

“Icons” includes much well-filmed footage of musicians performing and rehearsing in clubs and studios. They include Terence Blanchard (who also serves the role of wise elder in interviews); Jason Moran; the Bad Plus; and Medeski, Martin and Wood. These purely musical sequences are the major attraction of the program: they indicate what current jazz musicians are actually up to. The musicians themselves, talking to the camera, are generally prodded toward ideas that are much more philosophical and metaphysical.

In Episode 2 Ravi Coltrane breaks the pattern. During a pause in a recording session he explains the method of his latest work. “I’ve been improvising a lot of compositions lately, then using those parts and organizing those elements in a way that’s closer to traditional styles of writing,” he says. “What I’m left with is something that I wouldn’t have naturally written down.”

I bet he didn’t know how fresh he sounded. After more than an hour of theoretical, a minute of practical sounds brilliant. It also helps you understand, when you subsequently hear Mr. Coltrane’s music, the immediate challenges and concerns and ambitions of that music.


ICONS AMONG US

Jazz in the Present Tense

Documentary Channel, Monday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.


Directed by Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter J. Vogt; John W. Comerford, executive producer; Theo N. Ianuly, co-producer; Mr. Larson, director of photography. Produced by Paradigm Studio.