Icons Among Us, a four-part series beginning Monday on the Documentary Channel, serves as a retort to Ken Burns’s 2001 television documentary Jazz. It doesn't make this explicit, but it doesn't need to. There's no other elephant in the room.
Mr. Burns's series, you may remember, outlined styles and eras and individual accomplishments. His film--with a narrator supplying context and imposing historical judgments--attempted to tell the story from the music's beginning. He put forth a big extra-musical idea: jazz is the music of sophisticated Americans coming to terms with their country's sickness about race. And he did not bother much with current trends, putting all of jazz since 1960, more or less, inside its final episode.
When Mr. Burns's documentary came out, some viewers protested the way he seemed to shine up jazz's past at the expense of its present. This new film strikes a vague blow for those dissenters. In many ways Icons Among Us is starkly anti-Burnsian. It suggests jazz more as a philosophical ideal--"a reflection of what life could be," in the guitarist Bill Frisell's on-camera words, “where there's infinite possibilities, and no one gets hurt"--and less as a particular sound or tradition. It's mostly about musicians currently under 50. It has a lot of time for jazz that's basically pop: specifically, jam-band music or hip-hop. It presents jazz musicians as gifted but down-to-earth people, not demigods. And it's extra-wary about the tyranny of the past.
The first onscreen opinion comes from the trumpeter Nicholas Payton. “You have to let go of everything you've seen and heard to experience the truth," he says. “A lie is anything that has nothing to do with now. Truth is now."
Mr. Burns's series, you may remember, outlined styles and eras and individual accomplishments. His film--with a narrator supplying context and imposing historical judgments--attempted to tell the story from the music's beginning. He put forth a big extra-musical idea: jazz is the music of sophisticated Americans coming to terms with their country's sickness about race. And he did not bother much with current trends, putting all of jazz since 1960, more or less, inside its final episode.
When Mr. Burns's documentary came out, some viewers protested the way he seemed to shine up jazz's past at the expense of its present. This new film strikes a vague blow for those dissenters. In many ways Icons Among Us is starkly anti-Burnsian. It suggests jazz more as a philosophical ideal--"a reflection of what life could be," in the guitarist Bill Frisell's on-camera words, “where there's infinite possibilities, and no one gets hurt"--and less as a particular sound or tradition. It's mostly about musicians currently under 50. It has a lot of time for jazz that's basically pop: specifically, jam-band music or hip-hop. It presents jazz musicians as gifted but down-to-earth people, not demigods. And it's extra-wary about the tyranny of the past.
The first onscreen opinion comes from the trumpeter Nicholas Payton. “You have to let go of everything you've seen and heard to experience the truth," he says. “A lie is anything that has nothing to do with now. Truth is now."
