Jazz - A Film By Ken Burns (2000)

I recently got interested in Miles Davis and Jazz music  - so I decided to check out the Documentary by Ken Burns. And unsurprisingly, it turned out to be your standard, awful, Ken Burns/PBS production. We get all the usual Ken Burns' tropes:

• Endless liberal social commentary from a white POV. There's a real Margaret Mead "Hello Pygmies!" tone in the production when discussing Black people.
• Reduction of complex individuals to Social symbols 
• Pretentious talking heads/critics telling us what to think
• Pompous narration
• Celebrities giving us their silly "Layman's Opinions"
• Focus on a few "Big Names" while everyone else is ignored

It was so bad during Episode 8 "Risk" - I just stopped watching**. Burns reduces the entire Bebop movement and story of Jazz from 1946-1959 to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, with a few minutes expended for Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. Absurdly, Gillespie is written off as a failure who couldn't make Bebop massively popular, while Parker (Bird) is portrayed as a "Junkie" who did some mysterious magic on the bandstand.

What *exactly* Parker did that was so amazing is never really explained. We don't have enough time for that because Burns is talking endlessly about Heroin and Parker's private life. We also waste time on irrelevancies like (a) Dizzy had a female trombone player and (b) Armstrong played at an integrated club in 1947.

Summary: Every Ken Burns documentary seems made for a middle-aged woman who reads the NY Times and lives in Boston or SF.  I had hoped "Jazz" would be different - but I was wrong. If you liked Burns' other Documentaries you might like this one. If not, and you want to learn about the history of Jazz - just google it, and listen to some CD's. Rating **

**So, if Episodes 9 or 10 were the series highlight, I'm out of luck.