Sales for these few discs may be significant, but perhaps the general audience has merely decided that they have their jazz collection now, thank you. At the major record companies where investing in jazz has been on a steady decline and marketing and A&R departments have been resorting to the kind of asinine efforts at "crossover" which are currently destroying the classical recording industry Burns's, if anything, an annoying distraction. Until this series appeared, there was a consensus opinion among the majors that any jazz made prior to 1950 and the LP era was no longer worth bothering with.Although the venerable trade publication Billboard recently asked on its front cover, "Is A New Jazz Age Dawning?", that will be unwelcome news to executives who have been hard at work decimating the credibility of their jazz rosters. The wallpaper music of smooth jazz and jazz-lite vocalists is often the preferred point of investment for most of the majors now. At one label, for instance, they have celebrated Burns's film by dismissing the formidably talented New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton, whose recent record Dear Louis is a superb homage to Louis Armstrong.It's easy for any knowledgeable viewer to query the numerous omissions and inconsistencies in Jazz.
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are followed throughout their careers, often to the exclusion of many others. Plenty of influential musicians from Jack Teagarden to Keith Jarrett ?ldquo; don't even rate a mention. There's an inescapable sense, as it moves forward, of flooding an overcrowded quart into a pint pot. Burns's achievement, though, is to re-activate the almost mystical excitement which once accompanied the development of jazz. Watching the crowds assemble at Benny Goodman's first major New York appearance, or seeing such old stagers as Armstrong and Ellington as brilliant young men on a voyage of discovery, rekindles the sense of jazz as a limitless form, able to project an easily-communicated thrill along with its capacity for intensely personal expression: a genuine popular art.
It was teenagers, not bearded jazzbos, who made swing a national craze. Today's hip-hop has almost nothing to do with jazz, beyond a sense that it is a modern expression of a black music which these forebears first set down; yet watching Jazz throws up a strange sense of continuity. In Burns's depiction of a youthful music, enjoyed and sustained by a youthful America, he reinstates jazz as something from the past which should be celebrated, unequivocally, in the present.'Jazz' is on BBC2 from 9 to 27 June. Richard Cook is editor of 'Jazz Review' and co-author of 'The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD'. His book on Blue Note Records will be published by Secker & Warburg this autumn.
