In a Mist:
Thoughts on Ken Burns's Jazz

by Robin D. G. Kelley

I must begin with a confession: I served as one of those elusive advisors for Ken Burns’s Jazz. While I was a minor player in this big band of scholars, I must bear some responsibility for the final outcome. Let me emphasize some, because in the end this incredibly ambitious and at times startlingly beautiful film is Ken Burns’s vision of history—a cinematic vision that is characteristically linear, epic, heroic, masculine, and personality-driven. As advisors, our job was not to challenge the prevailing theory of history, but to get the facts straight, suggest lines of inquiry (for which there might be good visuals) and provide the much needed academic stamp of approval.

In publishing some of my thoughts about the series, my intention is neither to attack nor promote Jazz. While there are the obvious problems of omission, elision, and hyperbole, not to mention the reinscription of historical myths (e.g., jazz originated in New Orleans and then came up the river), I am more concerned with the construction of historical narratives and how they might reflect an implicit political agenda. The narrative that Burns and scriptwriter Geoffrey Ward present is commonsensical and at times compelling: slave songs and spirituals, transformed by emancipation, gave birth to the blues and ragtime, which begat early jazz, leading to swing, then bebop, then post-bop, avant-garde, fusion, and the neo-renaissance. This is the evolution of “jazz” in neat packages, each “stage” with differing degrees of blues roots. It is a linear history made clean by knitting together scraps of memory, recordings, and critical writings but framed largely by the marketing strategies of record companies and a jazz canon invented by critics whose livelihoods often depend on “jazz” publications. It all makes for good film, which is precisely what Ken Burns’s Jazz is supposed to be.

What such a narrative cannot accommodate is the slipperiness of these musical categories, how the lines distinguishing so-called jazz from blues, or R&B, or “free jazz,” or rock and roll, and even older black vernacular musics are not so sharp. The sharpening of the boundaries has more to do with marketing records and artists, or the declarations of those who claim to speak for the music. Perhaps this is part of the legitimation process of making jazz “high art” or “fine art” as critic Albert Murray might put it. We can claim that jazz has its own historical epochs not unlike Europe’s Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or modernist periods. The problem, of course, is that to divide European music into these grand eras is to invent fictive containers intended to make a diversity of musical styles and practices comprehensible and coherent long after their creation.

The word “jazz” functions the same way, except that its association with high culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. By treating jazz as a discrete, uncontested, clearly defined canon, Burns’s documentary cannot acknowledge musicians’ ambivalence toward the word. Max Roach campaigned against the term, Duke Ellington found it too limiting, Charles Mingus was never comfortable with it. To question the very label is to question the boundaries we’ve erected around the music. Why, for example, should we accept the line of reasoning that bebop arose out of the decline of swing? Perhaps the line we should draw is between swing and rock and roll, the newest dance music, which also incorporates some elements we identify with bebop through figures like Louis Jordan. What do we make of the fact that Dinah Washington recorded blues, jazz, pop songs, and gospel all at the same time? How did she understand these categories and did she change her style to fit each one?¹

Had the documentary devoted more time to the last forty years, there is no way the problem of defining jazz could have been avoided. From 1960 onward, even as it achieved a stature as full-blown art music worthy of repertory, the very category of jazz was stretched and questioned at every turn—whether it was through Lou Donaldson’s funky dance rhythms, the humorous eclecticism of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, or Fred Ho’s revolutionary Afro-Asian fusions. But rather than treat this as a dynamic moment in the history of jazz or evidence of the music’s elastic quality, the documentary presents the late 1960s through the 1970s as a period of decline. What saves jazz are the Reagan-era young lions like the Marsalis brothers who return to jazz’s “true” roots—a narrative I doubt any of the “young lions,” including Wynton, are comfortable with.

The film’s emphasis on the epic hero is symptomatic of a general inability to recognize “community”—a musician’s community, a dancer’s community, an African American community, and various overlapping communities that make up the world of jazz. It is an unfortunate absence, for the essence of jazz (if there is such a thing) is the conversational, collective, interactive character of the music. New ideas come out of collective work, improvisation, and competition but also from musicians educating each other. Contrary to the film’s claims, Louis Armstrong did not invent “swing” and Charlie Parker alone did not invent “bebop” phrasing. Rhythmic and harmonic innovations came from many people and exchanges, in the big bands of Earl Hines, Cab Calloway, Billy Eckstine, in the after-hours jam sessions, in the living room of Mary Lou Williams, in conversations on the bandstand, in the subway, or at the back of the tour bus. To know how the music changed and developed, we need to understand how the community worked.

And I mean worked. The film overlooks the conditions of musicians’ labor—the venues, the cabaret laws, recording contracts, pay scales, the union and how it functions, or the various ways race structures inequality in the music world. The conditions of labor deserve an entire book, but let us consider how the American Federation of Musicians dealt with pay scales for jazz and “popular” musicians versus concert artists. In 1936, according to Local 802’s handbook, musicians in dance bands received a minimum of $42 for a seven-day workweek consisting of five-hour evenings and three three-hour matinees, or forty-four hours of work. Concert performers earned $60 for six evenings of four-hour performances, or twenty-four hours of work. They were also entitled to an additional $10 for Sunday evening concerts.²

Jazz musicians were sometimes paid like sharecroppers. Club owners were known to start a bar tab and deduct drinks from their salary, and there are many stories of callous employers who exploited musicians with drinking problems. But if the alcohol affected one’s playing, it could result in the loss of a gig. Club owners wanted to make sure these artists could attract a substantial paying audience, which sometimes resulted in limits placed on their creativity in order to please the crowd. That jazz musicians have been historically underpaid goes without saying. Charlie Parker used to ridicule club owners on stage when he would slyly introduce his band or the next act: “The management has gone to gr-r-r-r-r-r-reat expense to bring you the next group. Let’s bring them on with a rousing round of applause.” It would have been useful to know how much money the lesser-known artists actually made, where they lived, what was union scale over time. When the film does address musicians’ labor, it makes for some brilliant moments. The treatment of the road trips black bands had to endure powerfully reveals the difficult conditions of work as well as the importance of community. In the age of segregation, band members recalled, black musicians often could not find hotels that could accommodate them, nor could they always afford to pay for a room. The musicians’ wives would go into black communities and request assistance with food and housing. Indeed, without the warm generosity of black communities across the country, the black bands could not have survived the grueling tour schedule, especially in the South.

Rather than expose the working conditions of jazz musicians, Burns’s Jazz follows the now common path of attributing much of the hardship to drug addiction. While it is important to acknowledge how alcohol and heroin ravaged generations of young musicians, there is very little discussion of the conditions that facilitated the circulation and use of drugs. Jazz was played largely in the hothouse of legal and illegal drug commerce. Moreover, the poverty, the nightly demands of creative labor, and the lack of any commitment to treatment or other kinds of constructive interventions are rarely discussed in any film or books on jazz. And the number of musicians who died due to complicated diseases and/or poor medical treatment (e.g., Herbie Nichols, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Bud Powell, and many others) have no place in the Burns/Ward narrative. Sadly, the social conditions of work and survival are treated as personal failings. Rather than examine the context for musical “genius”—racism, exploitation, poverty—we are given instead a story of self-destruction.

Ignoring community also has consequences for those whose stories don’t get told. Obviously, even a nineteen-hour documentary cannot pretend to be comprehensive, but Ken Burns pays very little attention to women in the jazz community. Of course, we discover a few vocalists along the way—Sarah Vaughan (who is honored for “thinking like a musician,” implying that she thinks like a male instrumentalist) and Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith (whose stories are more about personal tragedy than musical innovation). But women instrumentalists are virtually invisible. The talented pianist Lil Hardin appears mainly as Louis Armstrong’s wife, the woman behind the genius who helped remake him for public consumption. We never learn that the great Lester Young’s mother and sister, Irma, played saxophone in the Young family band. Melba Liston receives a twenty-second mention by the narrator, but she comes across as a novelty. By not delving into Liston’s work as a trombonist and arranger, we miss what she brought to the music. She was, after all, one of the central modernists on the trombone, along with J. J. Johnson, Curtis Fuller, Kai Winding, and others. Mary Lou Williams is barely mentioned and she is presented as a matron saint assisting the male geniuses of so-called “bebop.” We learn nothing about her musical ideas, her early experiments in extended composition, what she taught Bud Powell, or the fact that many of Monk’s ideas derive directly from some of her arrangements.

Finally, there is a five-second mention of the emergence of “all-girl” bands during World War II, such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Darlings of Rhythm. In light of Sherrie Tucker’s brilliant new book, Swing Shift, not to mention existing film documentaries chronicling these bands, Ken Burns and crew missed a unique opportunity to delve into what it meant to be part of a women’s community of jazz musicians.³ Tucker’s book examines, among other things, how race and gender shaped opportunities for women musicians, audience reception, and the overall evaluation of musicianship by women band members themselves. She also chronicles the markedly different experiences of women on the road—whether traveling to the official war front on behalf of the USO or the more familiar front known as the Jim Crow South. The absence of these bands in Burns’s narrative not only leaves us with an incomplete picture of the impact of World War II on the music but we end up with an impoverished view of the jazz community as a whole. For one thing, the conditions in which women instrumentalists participated lay bare the masculine culture at the core of the jazz world. Women such as Bertha Hope, Hazel Scott, Beryl Booker, Vi Burnside, Clora Bryant, Bert Etta Davis, Ina Ray Hutton, Lovie Austin, Emma Barrett, Dorothy Donnegan, and countless others shaped the development of the music and the culture and without their stories the entire picture is distorted.

The one “community” Burns acknowledges and privileges is the nation—here defined as one big American melting pot whose borders do not stretch beyond the redwood forests and the Gulf Stream waters. Jazz here is treated as a metaphor for that melting pot; despite its roots, it is not black music, nor does it have anything to do with Africa or the rest of the world for that matter. One would never know from the film that jazz had always absorbed music from all over the globe—from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. While the film mentions the usual suspects (Juan Tizol and Chano Pozo), we never get a sense of just how deeply the music of Latin America and the Caribbean influenced jazz. We can hear it in Duke Ellington’s 1930 recording of “Peanuts Vendor” (El Manisero), in Sidney Bechet and Willie “the Lion” Smith’s 1931 recordings as leaders of the Haitian Orchestra, in the prolific Frank “Machito” Grillo’s Afro-Cuban Orchestra featuring trumpeter and arranger Mario Bauza. Indeed, from the 1940s onward, the clave as well as the Afro-Cuban rhythms of the rumba, mambo, guaguancó, guaracha, and pachanga became fairly regular features of jazz composition.

But in the world according to Ken Burns, jazz is not only the exclusive property of the United States, but it has been a premiere manifestation of this nation’s democratic ethos. Jazz musicians are portrayed as united in their support for World War II, and at the height of the Cold War we are told that jazz was one of America’s most powerful weapons in their fight against communism. What we don’t learn is that a growing number of black musicians in this period were critical of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. There are countless stories of black musicians who used subterfuge to obtain a 4F status in order to avoid serving in World War II or Korea. Although we have no hard numbers, it is worth pointing out that by late 1943, African Americans comprised 35% of the nation’s delinquent draft registrants, and between 1941 and 1946, over two thousand black men were imprisoned for not complying with the provisions of the Selective Service Act.⁴ Black jazz musicians were so notorious for their indifference to the war effort that those who did serve in the armed forces were called “Jodys” (hipsters) by fellow servicemen and often singled out for particularly harsh treatment.

Some jazz musicians sought alternative identities by converting to Islam or supporting African nationalist movements. While the state department tried to peddle jazz to the world as evidence of America’s democratic success, black people back home were still denied citizenship. Black musicians never lost sight of this contradiction and some created new “freedom” songs. Moreover, a growing number of black musicians turned to Africa for musical as well as political inspiration. In the age of African and “Third World” liberation movements, Art Blakey wrote “Message from Kenya” and “Ritual”; Sonny Rollins, “Airegin”; John Coltrane, “Liberia,” “Dakar,” “Dahomey Dance,” and “Africa”; and Max Roach, “Tears for Johannesburg.” One of the most important recordings of the era was Randy Weston’s four-part suite, Uhuru Afrika (1960). Weston, the brilliant Brooklyn-born pianist/composer who had been exploring the connections between jazz and African music since at least the mid-1950s, pulled together a truly diasporic big band that included artists from West Africa, East Africa, Cuba, and the U.S. Among them was the Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Langston Hughes wrote the text, Melba Liston did the arrangements, and the result was a truly diasporic statement that both acknowledged the music’s ancient roots and charted a new path for modern jazz. For Weston, this was just the beginning: he has spent nearly half a century establishing relations with musicians from the continent. In 1967 he moved to Morocco where he resided for six years, running a performance space called African Rhythms Club and establishing a lifelong working relationship with the master musicians of the Gnawa.

Tragically, Weston’s name is never mentioned in Ken Burns’s Jazz. Why? Because his very work counters the film’s burning assumptions: that jazz is exclusively American to be exported to the rest of the world as an advance guard in the struggle for democracy. For Weston, the music was there before “jazz” ever entered the lexicon; it is world music, Africa’s contribution to civilization that has been taken up, transformed, and expanded in endless directions. Music is not an American export but a universal means of cultural exchange that resists any national identity. Had Weston been included, the narrative would have had to change. Besides challenging the film’s implicit American nationalism, we would have followed Weston back to Africa and discovered a parallel and connected history of “jazz” in the townships of Johannesburg and the after-hours clubs of Lagos and Tangier. We would have learned about South Africa’s Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim), Chris McGregor, and Johnny Dyani, or the Yoruba jazz band called the Cool Cats, who were hot in Lagos the same year Weston recorded Uhuru Afrika.

Weston represented something else that the film missed: an attempt to take the music out of the overpriced, exploitative, white-owned clubs and bring it to the very communities from which it sprang. From the late 1960s onward, a committed group of avant-garde or “free jazz” musicians, for example, sought performance spaces in black community centers, churches, schools and parks. Collectives such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, the Black Artists Group of St. Louis, and the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) run by the late Los Angeles pianist Horace Tapscott, held free concerts, set up institutions for music education, and reached a new generation of young people with the power of improvisational music. I would argue that these collectives not only kept the music alive during the 1970s, the alleged “dark ages” of jazz, but they pushed the boundaries of the music even further, embracing sounds, textures, and instrumentation from Asia, Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and the Caribbean. And yet, in Burns’s narrative these very artists are blamed for the death of jazz. By creating music the masses could not understand, music that did not “swing,” they lost their audience. They don’t tell us how many students came through the AACM schools in Chicago, or how Tapscott’s community-based performance space trained a new generation of hip hop artists, or the fact that during this period very few jazz artists could fill a room or sell a significant number of records. Again, had the film followed the story into these communities and ignored the strictly placed boundaries of the “jazz canon,” we might have had a different story.

In the end, I’m as grateful as anyone to Burns and his funders for giving us so much music and so much history into one project. I’m honored to have been a part of its making and appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts to struggle with us and with each other over the meaning and content of Jazz. Nevertheless, we must call it what it is: a work of canonization and legitimation. The recurring theme is that these individual artists took gutter music and transformed it into an art form. For me, this is the film’s fundamental problem, for it presumes that black vernacular music is simply not art. Why? What makes the music “art”? Innovation? An expression of genius and creativity? In a culture that emphasizes collective participation and individual self-expression, ensemble playing and solo improvisation, were there not always innovators who could move or confuse the crowd depending on their intent? What made this particular manifestation of black music an art form all of a sudden? The answer, I surmise, can be found in Tower Records. Jazz became an art form when it was turned into a prized commodity, when the dominant culture clamored for it, when the price of the ticket was too steep for the descendants of jazz’s originators. And when the arbiters of taste declared the music color-blind.

—New York University

Notes

Click on note number to return to its place in the text.

¹Some of these questions are explored eloquently in Guthrie Ramsey’s book, Race Music (University of California Press, in press).

² Robin D. G. Kelley, “Without a Song: New York Musicians Strike Out Against Technology,” in Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon Press, forthcoming), 136.

³ Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke University Press, 2000). A few of us suggested that the filmmakers contact Professor Tucker and incorporate some of her research into the film, but instead they asked her to write an essay for the Ken Burns’s Jazz website. It was an unfortunate compromise since the stories she captures in Swing Shift possess a rich cinematic quality.

⁴ Gerald R. Gill, “Dissent, Discontent and Disinterest: Afro-American Opposition to the United States’ Wars of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1986), 164-68; George Q. Flynn, “Selective Service and American Blacks during World War II,” Journal of Negro History 69 (Winter 1984), 14-25.

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In a Mist: Thoughts on Ken Burns's Jazz

by Robin D. G. Kelley

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In a Mist:
Thoughts on Ken Burns's Jazz