Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...salvation his music could bring. Parker, the greatest and most lyrical and most forbidding pioneer of bop--a word he disliked--who exerted an irresistible force on the music and a more perilous influence on anyone around him. "Bird was like fire," says John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. "You couldn't get too close...
...other half of my heartbeat," a formidable spirit and great artist who tried, and failed, to save Parker from the demons that drove and devoured him. Clifford Brown, dead in a car wreck, whose only vice was chess. Miles Davis, who beat back his inner darkness and took jazz to the peak of its last great popularity. Thelonious Monk, a generative spirit of compulsive genius, who applied a kind of circular geometry to the keyboard and gave jazz new contours. Billie Holiday, the beautiful desolation angel, the most ravishing and ravaged of jazz singers, whose rendition of Autumn...
...likely to have brought it off. Whatever the considerable merits of his previous epic undertakings like The Civil War and Baseball, they did not have the rich vein of recklessness, the abandon and the humor, the rhapsodic beauty or deep darkness, that are all so much a part of jazz. They may have been terrific, but they sure didn't swing...
Neither does Jazz. This is the work of someone taking a long look in from the outside, and this, paradoxically, is its greatest strength. The whole series practically reels from the excitement of discovery. The history is fresh, the music is new to Burns, who, he has said, knew almost nothing about jazz until an offhand remark by a baseball player being interviewed for his previous series set him to thinking and got him listening. The rest of us can hear Ellington play The Single Petal of a Rose or Parker lay into Cherokee and be stirred by mute wonder...
...hardly shows up at all (many--no, most--vocalists, Stan Kenton, Nat King Cole and his trio, Erroll Garner, Johnny Hodges), which is an inadvertent tribute to the immensity of the legacy that Burns mines broadly, but beautifully. There has also been loud dissatisfaction within the ranks of some jazz players and fans about the orthodoxy of Burns' taste, the safe selectivity of his classicism, the fact that he kisses off jazz's past quarter-century rather quickly in the last episode and only suggests where jazz might be heading in a brisk final montage that closes the series...