The 2001 Atlanta JAZZ Party!

For a number of weeks, everywhere I ran into friends... in church, the grocery store, the post office or on the sidewalk of our village, they would ask, " Are you enjoying JAZZ on PBS?" Or, "I'll bet you love the JAZZ show!" They would usually add that they're enjoying it and learning a lot. But, they also wanted me to comment. And, I find it difficult to do so. It's like being in a group of people where one person is telling the group about a movie they saw or a book they read. As you listen you want to say, "That's not how the story went" or, "You left out this important part of the story!" So, you have both errors of commission and errors of omission.

Don't get me wrong! I appreciate the attention that has been paid to our beloved art form -- JAZZ -- and I'm grateful to Ken Burns and his crew for bringing a 10-part, 19 1/2 hour jazz program to the masses. I enjoyed much of it, particularly the beginning episodes, and it was most delightful to see interviews with our friends Milt Hinton and Doc Cheatham. But it became painfully apparent as the program unfolded, that Burns was attempting to force-fit the tragic history of race relations to the history of jazz and I believe that errors slanted and gravely distorted the story.

Everyone who knows anything about jazz acknowledges that it was invented by blacks. Most historians also agree that Charles "Buddy" Bolden was the first jazzman. Burns says this but then has Wynton Marsalis and a band play in a style "like Buddy Bolden." Now Bunk Johnson who played with Bolden called Buddy's style rough and primitive (for reference and an approximate idea of how Bolden's band might have sounded listen to Don't Go 'Way, Nobody by George Lewis and His New Orleans Stompers recorded in 1943 and available from George Buck in New Orleans on AMCD 101). This was the song Buddy played along about midnight, after the young people (and the old people had left to go home, to let the hardcore dancers know the party was just getting started! Well, the sanitized version that was well-meaning Marsalis offered up was just one of the myriad unfortunate inaccuracies that diminished JAZZ.

Burns made a curious error of omission when he showed a picture of the Austin High Gang. Flashing a picture of Wingy Manone from New Orleans (without mentioning his name) he then showed a picture of a band on a sidewalk in Chicago... implying that it was the Austin High Gang, when in fact, it was a picture taken 10 years before the Austin High Gang of the Tom Brown Band from Dixieland (from New Orleans)! Burns missed a rich detail in failing to note the popular vaudeville star Joe Frisco posing in front of the band and an even tastier detail -- the young man holding Tom Brown's trombone case is AL CAPONE! A lost opportunity for sure to illustrate the connection between the mob and jazz that was prominent in Chicago in the "Jazz Age."

To my way of thinking, Burns' greatest mistake was his reluctance to acknowledge the contribution that great white players have made to the art of jazz. For example, Jack Teagarden is generally recognized as the greatest trombonist ever, yet Burns barely mentions him and his historical importance in taking the trombone from its traditional "oompah" role into its modern role as an elegant solo instrument.

In the '40s when I saw and heard many of the great jazzmen in person at Nick's, Eddie Condon's, Jimmy Ryan's and numerous other clubs on 52nd Street, jazz split roughly in two directions: Bebop and beyond on one hand, and Traditional or Classic Jazz on the other. I stayed with the classic players even though we were called "moldy figs" by the modernists! I think it's fair to say that Burns almost totally ignored the traditionalists. He quoted Condon on three occasions and showed the interior of his first club twice, but never mentioned the club by name and played none of his music. He did not mention: Wild Bill Davison, Bunny Berigan, Pee Wee Russell, Bobby Hackett, Yank Lawson, Bob Haggart, George Wettling, Muggsy Spanier, Eddie Lang, Joe Marsala and so on. He also failed to mention the New Orleans revival in the '40's... Bunk Johnson at Stuyvesant Casino in New York, Lu Watters in San Francisco and the hundreds of trad bands in this country and around the world that have followed the New Orleans revival. Not to mention the hundreds of professional jazz players of today who play in the tradition of the great jazz artists who started and nurtured the music to the marvelous levels we hear today.

Burns & Co. stressed for 19-1/2 hours how the white man mistreated the black man for the past 200 years or more and brought this to a symbolic head with Billie Holiday's wrenching song about lynching, Strange Fruit. He mentioned that it was a white man that wrote the poem that was put to music, but did not elaborate that, in fact, it was another white man, Milt Gabler of the Commodore Record Store who had the guts to record the song on his famous Commodore label. His label, along with Blue Note, recorded many great jazz musicians of the era both black and white, and often in mixed bands.

If it were given to me to have the enormous resources (Burns had $11 million) to produce a jazz history, you bet I would honor the great contributions blacks made to our art form. But I would surely broaden the picture greatly to include the enormous impact that whites here and abroad have had and continue to have on our music.

As to the relationship of jazz and race, I put forth the notion that jazz has done more to heal racial divisions than to perpetuate the problem. Hey, in 1936, long before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, Benny Goodman brought Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton into his band! I would emphasize the transcendent power of jazz and that playing and hearing hot, swinging music creates a positive bridge that brings people together and fosters a sense of community.

But here at the Atlanta Jazz Party we already know about that! Maybe, one of these days, Ken Burns will get lucky and find the real jazz scene.

---Phil Carroll

AJP HOME