Ken Burns, Jazz, and the Memory of Sound

The Starbucks Sessions

It was one of those bitter, steel-gray Toronto afternoons—January 25, 2001—when even the pigeons look like they’re second-guessing the whole flight business. Yorkville was thawing from its brief post-Christmas hibernation, brushing the frost from its Gucci windows, and Starbucks, for better or worse, had become a public square with foam.

That’s where I met Ken Burns.

He was fresh off his monumental public offering—Jazz, the nine-part, 19-hour odyssey that ran PBS ragged with its scope and conviction. A history of America told through the syncopated genius of its most wounded and defiant citizens. From Congo Square to 52nd Street, it traced the spiritual bloodline from Buddy Bolden to Coltrane, painting jazz not just as music, but as a moral reckoning.

We sat near the window, coffee in hand, surrounded by Yorkville chatter: finance guys who mistook volume for persuasion, artists bargaining with themselves, and baristas performing arias on espresso machines. I turned to Glenda Marlene, the ever-calm publicist from Verve Records, and asked her if someone could kindly muffle the sonic chaos. Burns chuckled. “It’s fitting,” he said. “Jazz was never born in quiet rooms.”

Burns wore his usual professorial armour: dark blazer, salt-and-pepper trim, eyes alert with documentary radar. He didn’t speak with the fevered jargon of music critics, but with the reverence of a preacher mid-sermon. “Jazz,” he told me, “Is the story of America at its best—artistic, contradictory, improvisational—and at its worst—cruel, segregated, unforgiving.”

Verve, always ready with a velvet bow, had just released a box set of recordings linked to the series—Duke, Billie, Dizzy, Satchmo—all sounding like their souls had been waiting for this spotlight. The soundtrack was more than an accessory; it was a companion spirit. Burns believed you couldn’t separate the music from the context—the bars from the battles, the solos from the sorrows. “Armstrong,” he said, “wasn’t just a horn player. He was our Homer.”

Yet Jazz, for all its praise, wasn’t spared criticism. Some accused Burns of lionizing specific figures—namely Wynton Marsalis—while sidestepping avant-garde voices, free jazz warriors like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Burns didn't flinch. “This was never meant to be definitive. It’s a door. Others can walk through and build rooms of their own.”

And indeed, they did.

Post-Jazz, Burns returned to the forge. There was The War (2007), a harrowing, cinematic detailing of WWII as lived by small-town Americans. Then came The National Parks (2009), a love letter to the idea of public space as democratic inheritance. In 2012, The Dust Bowl, where he resurrected the voices of survivors like field hollers from cracked Oklahoma plains.

But it was Country Music (2019) where he again summoned ghosts and chords in equal measure—telling the hillbilly side of the American story, this time with banjos, heartbreak, and a hard look at how race and class strummed beneath the twang.

Even as Netflix resurrects Jazz for new ears and eyes, the original ache remains: that music so intricate, rebellious, and majestic had to bloom from such bitter soil. In that café, Burns said something that still haunts me: “Jazz was our best argument for dignity, and our best evidence against it.”

We finished our coffees. The baristas never did turn the volume down.

But I didn’t mind anymore. Some conversations, like jazz, are meant to be heard between the noise.

Ken Burns: So, turn down jazz and turn down our records?

Bill King: No one can do that. Ken, I’ve assembled a few questions from scouring chat boards - conversations critiquing the documentary.

K. B: Isn’t it unbelievable? People need to get therapy immediately. I read one thing where they accused me of writing - what Wynton and Gerald Early - writing it down for them. We never did – we never told people what the questions were. The proof of this is – occasionally, Wynton looks up, obviously to read his cue cards, and because we are so clever, we have Gerald look down to read his.

B. K: Although the series has your stamp all over this, you never appear in the film.

K. B: But that’s the way to go.

B. K: You rely on journalists like Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddins to tell the meat of the story.

K. B: Disagree. Most of the talking heads are musicians – more than fifty percent. The single most excellent narrative device – the agent of narration - is what we wrote: the actual story. The talking heads either amplify or provide apostasy or controversy. Rarely do they direct the story other than like a cute antidote – a duel - Sydney Bechet fights as told by Wynton. The rest is our narration, research, and physical writing.

B. K: Gary Giddins seems to attract less criticism.

K. B: Only from one particular school. We are now discussing individuals who are one percent of one percent. They come with their baggage. Instead of watching my film, they take out a piece of paper. Wynton already means one thing to them, whereas to Americans, they accept him at face value. Gary Giddins means another thing to another set of critics, a good guy to counterbalance the bad guys. The rest of the world has no such baggage. They are decoding the symbolism of this based on everything these people have done before, yet none of them advance any of the agendas they have – none of them. They describe human beings – sounds of music.

B. K. How do you address an artist like Keith Jarrett, who talked about the series?

The NY Times printed a letter written by Keith Jarrett:

40 Years Missing
To the Editor:

Regarding Ken Burns's (or is it Wynton Marsalis's?) "Jazz": Now that we've been put through the socioeconomic, racial forensics of a jazz-illiterate historian and a self-imposed jazz expert prone to
Sophomoric generalizations and ultraconservative politically correct (for now) utterances, not to mention a heavy-handed narration (where every detail takes on the importance of a major revelation) and Weepy-eyed nostalgic reveries, can we have some films about jazz by people who know and understand the music itself and are willing to deal comprehensively with the last 40 years of this richest of
American treasures?

KEITH JARRETT
New York

K.B: I’ve heard what he had to say – read it in the New York Times. I don’t address it. I won't dignify the racism. I think his comment diminishes his stature as an artist.

B.K: Much is directed at Wynton.

K.B: The last time I checked, it was a free country, and people are allowed to have opinions. Nobody can blame me for including people. Please consider the diverse range of people featured in this film. James Lincoln Collier, Dick Sudhalter, Gee Lees, Wynton, Stanley, Albert Murray, Gary – a whole range of other people. Somehow, when some see Wynton appear, they only see the evil. The rest of the country considers a genius who is helping them understand this music, which the people are calling “this evil,” has done the best to obscure it from the public. It’s hilarious.

B.K: I see Wynton playing the role Leonard Bernstein did in explaining classical music to a broad audience.

K.B: One of the most outstanding teachers I have ever met. I have no idea what Jarrett’s beef is with him or them – I do not care. It’s tied up in jealousy. Keith Jarrett is not in the film. Neither is Francis Davis in the movie. His wife is Terry Gross. She refused to have us on Fresh Air, which I now call ‘Stale Air.’ So frightened of our ideas - she had a week of jazz and allowed her visitors to trash the film without any chance for us to say, ‘get a life.’ These people need to get their lives together. This is a good thing for jazz unless you don’t want that. I don’t think Keith Jarrett wants good things to happen for jazz. He’s so self-involved with his battles that he’s forgotten that I’m uninterested in them. When little kids squabble, they think that who hit whom first is the most important thing. I’m only interested in telling this story – the story of this music.

B.K: The series has a near reverent tone to it. Was this planned?

K.B: No, it’s just the commentaries of people. I’m a documentary filmmaker, looking and asking people. If someone tells me that he plans to make the ‘angels weep’ – hmm – that sounds interesting. If someone says his talents are ‘God-given’ or ‘for her, it was better than reefer or alcohol.’ You are looking at an 80-year-old woman – a yenta, if you will. It’s a hilarious bite. It is possible to take things out of context and say this is what I’m saying, but to be accurate journalistically, as I hope people would want to be, you would see this is part of the collection of commentary. Even when it comes close to this, the narration will say – some people will say – it’s a ‘gift from God.’ Since everyone we talked to said Armstrong was a gift from God or an angel, we still said and qualified it with saying, some people will say.

B.K: I don’t think players who come out of universities, especially since the sixties, have fun with the music like their peers.

K.B: I agree. They were involved in art, not an academic discipline. Tolstoy said ‘Art was the transfer of emotion from one person to another.’ I think what we find with the people we focus on early in the film, the history of jazz, were people who still believed in it as an art. Now people talk about art, but they don’t practice art. My film doesn’t say that. It’s just the humble comments of a citizen now that the film is done. The film doesn’t in any way suggest that.

B.K: As complex as the music is, it must have been difficult keeping the story simple?

K.B: This was the most complex narrative I’ve ever tried to wrestle with. The overlapping stories—the seed gets planted in episode three and sort of blossoms in episode four—disappear for five episodes and then return in episode six. A person dies in seven. That kind of stuff intertwines the forty or so people who form the backbone and the other hundred and fifty who cross this stage. It’s the most complicated thing. What complicated the process even more than wrestling with a complex narrative was figuring out what story we needed to tell. No one is permitting me among the ‘jazzerati’ to have my art. Take my block of stone and carve it. That’s what I’ve done. But they say, 'No, you have to slice it as I want it carved.' To which I say – fine, make your film. My words to Keith Jarrett – you don’t have to be rude, completely intolerant, and indeed racist. Why don’t you make your film to glorify the white contribution to jazz if you feel I haven’t exalted it? You can be more than sophomoric. That’s fine, but you’ve got to do it. This took six years and millions of person-hours.

B.K: Some say the film does diminish the role of the white musician in the development of jazz.

K.B: I'm afraid I have to disagree. The response I’m getting to the stories of Bix Beiderbecke – Paul Whiteman, of which we liberated Paul Whiteman from the yoke of a rip-off artist. We liberated Bix Beiderbecke’s story to an intense complexity. Freed Benny Goodman from the knee-jerk liberal assumption that he just stole. Glorified Artie Shaw. Dave Brubeck is a vast, tremendous, potent force in the film. This music is born in the African/American community; I’m sorry. It’s an opportunity for me to discuss race. Maybe what it is – people don’t want me to practice my art. They want me to have an objective view of jazz. And no one can do that.

B.K: The film says jazz is about America, but what if the other countries embraced the music early?

K.B: Well, I’m an American filmmaker, and I’m interested in using my subjects to tell me how my country works. So naturally, I’m going to have that kind of parochial view. The film continually acknowledges foreign influences and relationships in every episode. Indeed, because this is an art form rather than an indigenous folk music, anyone can play it and contribute to it. And the last end of the film sort of celebrates the glorious inclusiveness of jazz. The fish I wanted to fry had to do with the way jazz reveals to us in America, who we are, good and bad.

B.K.: You took some flak over Baseball for not including modern-day players.

K.B: How many times do I have to say this – I am in the business of history. History is about stories that are over. I always stop – including the baseball series twenty-five years ago- and tell people I’m doing this, unhitching my narrative, and then spend an ‘outro’ taking in that period. The modern period does not have the historical perspective to judge. But, if that’s a continuing problem as it seems to be – then I ask every person, I ask you, I ask Keith Jarrett – who among today’s players are the equal artistically to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie. You probably wouldn’t know until we get several more years out who else are the most essential people in jazz. It may be Keith Jarrett or Wynton. Or it’s a combination of Keith and Wynton, and if they’d only play together, it would be great. We don’t know.

B.K: I would argue Herbie Hancock is one of the last of the impactful innovators.

K.B: He’s in my film. He’s in the last of our twenty-two living artists, which include Brubeck, Ornette Coleman (Burns gets interrupted for an autograph). “The last two are pretty spectacular – did you see Parker’s death last night?” That is the people’s reaction to the film. When I talk to people, ninety percent of the questions are about the three or four negative articles and all the harping on the Internet, of which a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth ever gets started. But the truth just walked out the door! I made it for her!