147 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jazz Did Not End in 1955!, November 11, 2000
Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns have produced another handsome book, featuring the same opulent look and feel as their earlier, best selling books on The Civil War and Baseball. Their writing on jazz's early history is outstanding. Burns & Co. have also done a magnificent job of culling the nation's photo archives for rare photos of jazz's most famous founding fathers along with many of its long since forgotten contributors. For me, this alone is worth the price of admission.
The big problem with this book is that it provides, at best, a severely truncated and tendentious history of the music. The (generally crisp) narrative simply peters out about 1955. One chapter gives a cursory overview of several developments in the 1950s. The final chapter covers the remaining 40 years in a slim, almost perfunctory twenty or thirty pages. Perhaps the book should have been titled "Jazz: The First 50 Years."
It appears to me that the authors - both autodidacts in the field of jazz - simply lost their nerve. Writing a jazz history in the years after 1950 admittedly gets harder. The music splits into many competing schools and styles. Much of it is simply harder for the uninitiated to listen to. But this is no excuse to gloss over or ignore the great music and musicians who mean so much to jazz fans born after 1940. (Would you believe that Charles Mingus only merits a piddling sidebar?)
The authors seem to have signed onto the orthodoxy of Wynton Marsalis and his ilk. In a nutshell, this holds that jazz took (multiple) wrong turns in the modern era. It stopped featuring the familiar, danceable, toe-tappable shuffling swing that earned it its original popularity. In other words, modern jazz has turned into a musical dead end. The only hope for its salvation is to return to the earlier swing and bop forms and overlay them with a slightly more complex and refined sensibility. It is not hard to discern within the narrative the heavy hand of critics who comprise this school of thought: Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton himself.
In sum, by embracing a cramped, severely circumscribed definition of jazz, the authors utterly fail to understand (much less elucidate) the modern era in jazz. Free jazz was/is more than just angry black nationalist ranting. Fusion, at its best, was not simply a sell-out to triumphalist rock. (And, no, Miles Davis did not "denature" the music when he plugged in.)
For me, the elegiac tone of this book is both insulting and patronizing. Baseball did not begin to die when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Neither did jazz when Ornette Coleman whipped out his alto sax in New York City in 1959.
By all means, do buy this beautiful book. Just be aware of the stultifying orthodoxy emanating from each of its glossy pages.
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43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not perfect, but wonderful nonetheless, January 3, 2001
I loved this book; it's well-balanced and has plenty of cultural perspective. There were lots of anecdotes and photos that I have never seen before (the pictures of blacks dancing at an outdoor big band show at Randalls Island in 1938 are almost worth the price of the book alone). The main criticism about this book (and the Ken Burns Jazz series in general) is that it gives short shrift to jazz since the 1960s. First off, as Ken Burns has said himself, he's an historian, so this project will obviously focus more on the origins and development of the music rather than present-day musicians. And as much as today's jazz musicians and fans like to tell you otherwise, there haven't been too many groundbreaking developments in the music since the free jazz movement of late Coltrane and early Ornette Coleman, or the funk/rock excursions by Miles Davis. Furthermore, and more importantly, jazz is simply no longer a big part of the present-day American landscape. Although jazz records rarely sold as well as more pop-oriented music (a jazz record that sold 20,000 copies was considered a big hit), the music was always written about in mainstream publications and talked about by just about anyone. Heck, guys like Miles, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Coltrane were occasionally featured on prime-time television. Today, the biggest (and perhaps only) jazz star is Wynton Marsalis, a bland neo-traditionalist who hasn't forged any new ground himself. For myself, I'd rather read about Satchmo, Bird, Billie Holiday and Monk.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Introduction To Jazz, January 23, 2001
I would endorse this book and the accompanying series as a way for neophytes to enter an extremely challenging and complicated genre and as a reasonably good summation of the history of Jazz through 1960. But I would hope that Ken Burns' work isn't received as the final word on Jazz. Too often projects of these nature take on a Hand of God character and are regarded simply as the final take on a theme. Not so here, and anyone who knows the history of Jazz will point to numerous ommissions throughout the series. But if you're looking for a good entertaining way to learn or enjoy Jazz, this is probably a good bet. And if even one person ends up liking Jazz as a result of Burns' work, the world will be a better place. The series can't hurt and the debate is healthy. It just shouldn't be regarded as the only word on the subject.
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