Ken Burns History of Jazz 1 - Gumbo (Begginings to 1917)
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Stumble ThisJAZZ begins in New Orleans, nineteenth century America's most cosmopolitan city, where the sound of marching bands, Italian opera, Caribbean rhythms, and minstrel shows fills the streets with a richly diverse musical culture. Here, in the 1890s, African-American musicians create a new music out of these ingredients by mixing in ragtime syncopations and the soulful feeling of the blues. Soon after the start of the new century, people are calling it jazz.
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Jazz : A Film By Ken Burns DVD added by: mauz15 
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As a jazz noob, it would be nice if someone with experience could tell me the quality of this documentary. Ken burns is good at documentaries, but does he know enough about jazz? I find the series interesting, but have my doubts.
The first couple of episodes are quite good, and give a decent overview of the beginnings of jazz. But as it gets closer to the end of the series, he gets bogged down in conservatism, and gives a quite reactionary view of modern jazz. The problem is that it depends too much on the interviews with Wynton Marsalis. It would have been better with some more diversity among the sources.
It's well put together and contains a lot of great music and video clips that can serve as an introduction to the diversity of the earlier forms of this genre.
I think this quote from Jeffrey St. Clair sums up the brunt of the criticism:
"Ken Burns's interminable documentary, Jazz, starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there ... Burns is a classicist, who is offended by the rawer sounds of the blues, its political dimension and inescapable class dynamic. Instead, Burns fixates on a particular kind of jazz music that appeals to his PBS sensibility: the swing era. It's a genre of jazz that enables Burns to throw around phrases such as 'Ellington is our Mozart.' He sees jazz as art form in the most culturally elitist sense, as being a museum piece, beautiful but dead, to be savored like a stroll through a gallery of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(TV_series)#Negative_reviews