Submitted by Mike (not verified) on Sun, 2007-12-23 14:46.
Well, I can’t really speak to how good the War is, and I still havn’t heard the podcast. I’m really interested to hear what Lydon said about nostalgia, because it really strikes me that it is Burns’ artistic coin. W/r/t the war – you may well be right about the overly politicized view in the article I sight, and I can certainly take your point about Polemics and Zinn. Not having heard the interview or seen the film, I’m not comfortable straying much more afield here.
I do have more to say about Burns in relation to Jazz, though.
W/r/t Jazz – you can be skeptical of latter day Jazz, but he’s not even skeptical, he’s outright dismissive of anything post Mile’s Davis’s Kinda Blue. Even masterpieces of Mile’s later career like Bitches Brew gets raked over the coals. Burns definitely comes down on a single side in a long running argument about the meaning and evolution of Jazz, and it’s not even as if he tried to show both sides and tell people that such an argument exists. For him to come out with the definitive history of Jazz and make such an egregiously biased piece speaks highly ill of him to me. And that’s just at the later end of the series. Burn’s interpretation of Jazz is also highly connected to a certain type of Jazz musician and sound. Can you really tell me that in an entire history of Jazz there’s no room for single mention of Jazz guitar or Django Rheinhardt?
You may say that his style is to let the human subject guide him, but he has a choice in who those subject are. In this instance, it seems he relied almost exclusively on the guidance of Winton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, the two pillars of Jazz music and criticism whose line he basically parrots throughout the entire series.
There’s a lot to learn from his Jazz documentary, but it also presents a horribly skewed picture. At what point, as a documentarian and really a public historian, does Burns have to take some responsibility for that?
Burns Baby Burns
Well, I can’t really speak to how good the War is, and I still havn’t heard the podcast. I’m really interested to hear what Lydon said about nostalgia, because it really strikes me that it is Burns’ artistic coin. W/r/t the war – you may well be right about the overly politicized view in the article I sight, and I can certainly take your point about Polemics and Zinn. Not having heard the interview or seen the film, I’m not comfortable straying much more afield here.
I do have more to say about Burns in relation to Jazz, though.
W/r/t Jazz – you can be skeptical of latter day Jazz, but he’s not even skeptical, he’s outright dismissive of anything post Mile’s Davis’s Kinda Blue. Even masterpieces of Mile’s later career like Bitches Brew gets raked over the coals. Burns definitely comes down on a single side in a long running argument about the meaning and evolution of Jazz, and it’s not even as if he tried to show both sides and tell people that such an argument exists. For him to come out with the definitive history of Jazz and make such an egregiously biased piece speaks highly ill of him to me. And that’s just at the later end of the series. Burn’s interpretation of Jazz is also highly connected to a certain type of Jazz musician and sound. Can you really tell me that in an entire history of Jazz there’s no room for single mention of Jazz guitar or Django Rheinhardt?
You may say that his style is to let the human subject guide him, but he has a choice in who those subject are. In this instance, it seems he relied almost exclusively on the guidance of Winton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, the two pillars of Jazz music and criticism whose line he basically parrots throughout the entire series.
There’s a lot to learn from his Jazz documentary, but it also presents a horribly skewed picture. At what point, as a documentarian and really a public historian, does Burns have to take some responsibility for that?