When Ken Burns' series Jazz was shown on television in 2001,
it was criticised by some reviewers for excluding certain musicians
- for example, Erroll Garner. This illustrates the difficulty of covering
the history of jazz in ten two-hour programmes. If that was difficult
enough, how can you cram the development of jazz into less than 100
minutes? That is what The Story of Jazz attempts, with varying
degrees of success.
On the plus side, the DVD includes interviews with numerous musicians
and pundits, including Wynton Marsalis, Milt Hinton, Carmen McRae,
Bud Freeman, Lester Bowie and Billy Taylor. It also traces the story
of jazz from the transportation of slaves to the Caribbean, where
their music came in contact with European styles. This is the first
DVD I have seen about jazz that mentions the composer Louis Gottschalk,
who was born in New Orleans and whose music was influenced by the
singing and dancing he witnessed in Congo Square. Scott Joplin is
often lauded as the progenitor of ragtime but Gottschalk's compositions
might be said to have anticipated ragtime rhythms in such works as
La Bamboula (sub-titled Danse des Nègres) from 1847
and Le Banjo from the mid-1850s.
The DVD then follows jazz as it developed through such legendary
figures as Buddy Bolden and other New Orleans trumpeters that inspired
Louis Armstrong, who Wynton Marsalis describes as "the father
of the organised solo". We are reminded that New Orleans was
a melting pot of different peoples and musical genres, as well as
having the first opera company in America. As a drummer, I was fascinated
to see film of a man playing a drum-set improvised from tin cans,
with a wooden box as the bass drum (complete with homemade pedal)
and a tin lid as a cymbal.
Of course, one problem with such historical programmes is the paucity
of film of jazz musicians. The film clips on this DVD are not always
accompanied by appropriate music - for example, clarinettist Jimmie
Noone is backed by trumpet music. But there is some good footage of
such people as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Billy Eckstine's ground-breaking
band, although the tendency in those days was for musicians to mime
on film. There is footage of Bud Powell that I hadn't seen before
but the clip of Sarah Vaughan has out-of-synch sound.
There is no real explanation of what bebop was - except that musicians
tended to play more notes. But the stimulating point is made that
Dizzy Gillespie hiring conga drummer Chano Pozo was a return to the
Afro-Caribbean roots of jazz. The DVD tends to skate over the last
30 or 40 years of jazz - perhaps because the film was made in the
early 1990s, but it is still a fault that we learn little of what
happened after John Coltrane and jazz-rock. Another problem with this
type of DVD is that you may not want to watch it more than once. However,
within these limitations it provides a valuable and intriguing survey
of much jazz history. It was part of a series called "Masters
of American Music" which also included documentaries about individual
musicians like Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
Some of these programmes are being reissued on DVD and may help to
fill out the story of jazz.
Tony Augarde
CD Reviews
Medici Arts 2057158
