Theodore Gracyk 173

Theodore Gracyk

JAZZ AFTER JAZZ: KEN BURNS AND THE

CONSTRUCTION OF JAZZ HISTORY

As all action is by its nature to be gured as extended in

breadth and in depth, as well as in length; and so spreads
abroad on all hands . . . so all narrative is, by its nature, of only
one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards
successive points; narrative is linear, action is solid. Alas for our
chains or chainlets, of causes and effects.
Thomas Carlyle, On History, 1830

Jazz and freedom are synonyms.

Mezz Mezzrow

J AZZ , A F ILM BY K EN B URNS is a fascinating and monumental achieve-

ment. In this essay, I identify and critique some of the projects core
assumptions. My principal target is the assumption that a specic
essence of jazz underlies most (but not all) of the music that is regularly
identied as jazz and that the historical unfolding of this essence is the
true subject of a historical investigation of jazz. This assumption
accounts for the projects otherwise puzzling suggestion that jazz
history ended approximately thirty-ve years ago.
The most visible element of the historical project is the ten-part,
nineteen-hour documentary, Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns. However, the
historical project has three other public elements. The rst is a book,
Jazz: A History of Americas Music.1 Credited to both Geoffrey C. Ward and
Ken Burns, the bulk of the book is the lms spoken text, which
includes both a unifying narrative and numerous quotations. The book
makes it clear that this text is primarily Wards work. Second, there is a
website that makes available extensive transcripts of many of the

Philosophy and Literature, 2002, 26: 173187

174 Philosophy and Literature

seventy-ve interviews conducted for use in the lm. Third, there is a

set of twenty-two compact discs, each giving an overview of an impor-
tant jazz musician (e.g., one devoted to Count Basie, one devoted to
Dizzy Gillespie). Highlights of these discs have, in turn, been assembled
into a ve-disc box set called Ken Burns Jazz. My aim is to reveal and
examine the conceptual scaffolding that supports and organizes this
vast, multifaceted project.
What is the principal assumption of this historical project? The
project consistently emphasizes the musics capacity to give audible
embodiment to the idea of American democracy. At the same time, the
project is less than forthcoming about the aesthetic assumptions
embraced by Ward and Burns. Familiar and predictable arguments are
introduced to justify the appellation of art and to address the issue of
the purported death of jazz in the 1970s. However, these two strands of
the larger argument may be at cross-purposes with the principal
assumption and the ideology that jointly justify the projects status as
jazz history.
Let me begin by describing the principal assumption in some detail.
While there is no reason to suppose that its source is Ken Burns or his
chief collaborator, historian Geoffrey Ward, the following blurb was
used to advertise the project:

Jazz has been called the purest expression of American democracy; a

music built on individualism and compromise, independence and coop-
eration. Join us for an exploration of jazz, Americas greatest cultural
achievement.

In keeping with this theme, the narration and principal interviewees

of the lm are positioned to emphasize that jazz is an audible
embodiment of the idea of American democracy. Let us call this idea
the democracy thesis. It is placed as a frame around the whole lm:
Wynton Marsalis announces it in the opening minutes of the rst
episode, and then he reiterates it in fresh words at the end of the last
episode. Although it is repeated with numerous variations, the democ-
racy thesis proposes that jazz involves an ideal of democratic America,
not the fact of life in America: jazz, Wynton Marsalis assures us, is a
glimpse of what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this
music tells you that it will become itself.2 Jazz reveals the need to
address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with
them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out.
 Theodore Gracyk 175

Thats how our music could teach what the meaning of American
democracy is.3 Or, as Marsalis says at the start of Episode One, jazz is an
improvised art that demands group negotiation, where that negotia-
tion is the art.4 The Burns/Ward history is constructed to reveal the
musics progressive embodiment of this social ideal of democratic
negotiation. The music, when artistically successful, is our conrmation
that the ideal can be realized in practice.
As expressed by Marsalis, the democracy thesis seems a variant of
Bruno Nettls idea that the organization of music expresses a cultures
relevant central values in abstracted forms.5 More to the point, it
echoes Kathleen Higginss modication of Nettl. Higgins proposes that
while some music reects existing social patterns, other music insinu-
ates a model of future or improved social relationships within a society.
Higgins offers jazz as music that insinuates an improved America. She
points to Coltranes soloing in A Love Supreme as an example of a
more respectful role for African-Americans in American life, a role in
which the individual voices of African-Americans are heard and valued
and to which the larger community makes appropriate adjustments.6 I
propose that the Burns/Ward history is organized to reveal the musics
progress toward embodiment of just such an ideal.
The democracy thesis is an extremely bold one, for Burns and Ward
seem to mean that jazz is Americas principal artistic mode for reecting
on what it is to be an American. I want to explore the complications
that arise when the project identies no progress in jazz after the 1960s
while also arguing that jazz is not dead. As I have already intimated, the
premises that support the latter argument are at cross-purposes with
the democracy thesis.

II
There is a standing distinction between two types of history: chronol-
ogy and narrative. A chronology traces a temporal succession, and Jazz
would be notable for its scope and insight even if it were merely a string
of chronologies. A narrative is more ambitious than a chronology.
Burns and Ward construct a narrative. They need a genuine narrative to
support their strong thesis of jazz as Americas greatest cultural achieve-
ment in a sense that does not make it mere happenstance that jazz is an
American art and that it is music of considerable aesthetic merit.
As with a literary narrative, a historical narrative structures its
chronology in anticipation of some development that will arise from
176 Philosophy and Literature

the assembled events. A chronology satises itself with a chain of

sufcient causes. A narrative history assumes both teleology and clo-
sure: the story moves toward a goal, and events are included in the
narrative because they are instrumental in progress toward the goal or
because they complicate that progress and must be overcome before
the goal can be realized. But something must be resolved or something
must be gained. In this respect, a narrative history meets the criteria
that John Dewey stipulates for having an experience: selected features
from the general stream of experience are highlighted for the way
that some process is so rounded out that its close is a consummation
and not a cessation. A history differs from the drift of change
precisely in having its own plot, its own inception and movement
toward its close, . . . having its own particular rhythmic movement . . .
with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout.7
If Deweys ideas are no longer at the forefront of our theorizing, the
central point about history has remained current thanks to Arthur
Dantos thesis of the end of art.8 The thesis of an end of art demands a
historical narrative. As Danto remarks, one writes a narrative only
when something is felt to have come to an end.9 Dantos point will
soon be taken up when I examine the argument that jazz died and yet
lives again.
Jazz rst pursues narrative in describing progress toward the goal of
art status for jazz. The lowbrow music takes a decisive rst step toward
art status in its third decade when Louis Armstrong demonstrates the
possibilities of the virtuoso solo. At the same time, the story repeatedly
hints that Armstrong transformed jazz into an art form without trans-
forming himself into a full-edged artist. Gary Giddens offers the
critique: Armstrong did not distinguish between being an artist and
being an entertainer. He was a great artist but he was there to entertain
you . . . and this drove a lot of people nuts.10 Among his other sins,
Armstrong continued to tell jokes on stage and he insisted on perform-
ing his politically incorrect signature song, Sleepy Time Down South.
As such, Armstrong retarded progress toward the closure that comes
when unmitigated art status fuses with the jazz traditions most perfect
embodiment of American democracy. That perfect fusion is the Miles
Davis Quintet that stabilized from 1964 to 1968 (Davis, Hancock,
Shorter, Carter, Williams). Among others, tenor saxophonist Joshua
Redman praises the quintet: they could do anything with any form,
with any tune, because they knew each other so well as musicians. . . . I
cant imagine a greater level of group interplay. Michael Cuscuna
 Theodore Gracyk 177

backs him up: There was an empathy among those ve people where
they could think as one . . . they were free to go anywhere they wanted
to, and they knew everyone would follow.11
But why locate the pinnacle of jazz evolution with Miles Davis and
this quintet? Why not Duke Ellington? Like Armstrong, Ellington would
not abandon the masses. He wanted to be popular and he liked it when
the audience danced. And the narrative repeatedly emphasizes that
dancing and any attempt to cater to the squares must be taken as
evidence of a compromise of art.
The attainment of genuine art status comes with bebop (particularly
in late-night jam sessions, after the squares have gone home), two
decades before the narrative nds its closure in the perfect democratic
interplay of the great Miles Davis Quintet. Complications arise to delay
that closure. Bebops cult of the soloist is at odds with democratic
interplay. Dope arrives on the scene. Cool jazz appears in California
and art status is temporarily debased by its popularity with the white
college crowd; America is misled as Dave Brubeck appears on the cover
of Time magazine before Duke Ellington earns a cover story with his
appearance at the 1956 Newport Festival.12 The narrative culminates in
Episode Ten by reaching closure on the democracy thesis (not with
bebops attainment of art status). But the lm does not end, and the
organization of the narrative strongly parallels Arthur Dantos account
of arts progressive history in his celebrated analysis of the end of art.
Recall that Danto allows that there is no contradiction is saying that
painting has its own history after playing a central role in bringing
about the end of art. Painting realized arts essence and we now nd
ourselves living after the end of art history. In the aftermath of that
realization we live with a radical pluralism that makes it impossible to
continue with any linear narrative that traces further stages of progress
toward the essence of art.13 Humanity still has a need for art (if only as
decoration and entertainment) and while painting may have its own
local history, that narrative should not be confused with the narrative
that culminates in paintings completion of the project of pictorial
representation.
While Burns and Ward posit an end of jazz history, jazz continues to
be made after the end of jazz history. This continuation after the end of
jazz history replicates Dantos insight that many arts continue after the
end of art. But once the end of art was on the horizon (that is, once
photography and cinema signaled the end of its progressive history),
the artworld urgently required a new theory of art to justify the activities
178 Philosophy and Literature

of visual artists in an age that had no need of their services with respect
to mimetic representation. The artworld coped by embracing the
expression theory of art. While there is genuine progressive improve-
ment in artistic mimesis, Danto argues that post-historical visual art will
carry no historical signicance. For expression allows for change
(different styles emerge) but not development. In deleting representa-
tion from the denition of art, expression theory demands a revised
structure for understanding the history of art. Narrative is supplanted
by chronology. Burns and Ward construct a parallel account of jazz.
What central problem provides the internal direction for their
narrative?14 It must involve the democracy thesis. How does that thesis
receive its ultimate realization with the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-
1960s, so that the music played by Davis in the last decade of his life
must be post-historical jazz? Considerable attention is paid to the late
careers and deaths of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so it is no
accident that neither the book nor the lm acknowledges that Davis
made music from 1980 until his death in 1991. A mere chronology
could allow that jazz got tired, wore itself out, or lost ground to its
competitors in a ckle world of shifting tastes. But in treating the Davis
quintet as the culmination of jazz history, the narrative is constructed to
highlight the problem of Miles Davis. And that problem is that his
inuential defection to fusion helped to kill jazz when it was already
emaciated by numerous defections to the avant-garde, so that jazz after
the fusion years is jazz atrophied.
Just as we live with painters and paintings after the end of art, the
Burns/Ward narrative must explain the status of jazz after it (and with
it, American high culture?) reaches its proper end. The history that
culminates with the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s is the project
of America nding itself in jazz. If so, then after this music there is no
internal direction for further American art or American musical history.
Jazz may live on, but there is no further evolution of jazz as an American
cultural achievement. Just as post-historical visual art was explained by
the doctrine that artists express feelings, we nd that Burns and Ward
explain the continued relevance of jazz by appealing to expression
theory.
The shift to expression theory marks the abandonment of any
historical narrative, allowing Burns and Ward to answer Miles Daviss
opinion that jazz died before 1970.15 Jazz just kind of died, Branford
Marsalis agrees. It just . . . went away for a while.16 Joshua Redman
testies to the traditions continuing life, Jazz is as alive and as well . . .
 Theodore Gracyk 179

and creative as its ever been. But the days of evolution and linear
progress may be over.17 Redman does not say those words in the lm.
Instead, Jazz offers his summary of the future of jazz: there are original
artists out here who have something original to say, who are expressing
their original feelings and original experiences as human beings today.
And as long as that continues, jazz will be ne.18
Paired with Stanley Crouchs dismissal of popular music, Redmans
comments constitute the lms summation of the health of jazz. It
seems that jazz is alive because there are many original artists within
jazz who are important for their ability to express their original
feelings. But surely there is nothing distinctive about jazz here, for the
same can be said about both serious composers and a fair number of
popular artists outside jazz. This defense has absolutely nothing to do
with the purported essence of jazz, the democratic spirit. Worse yet, any
normal understanding of the expression theory subordinates group
cooperation and negotiation to individual expression.19 Given the
history of jazz presented in the lm, this sudden appeal to expression
theory leaves the patient looking none too healthy. Or, like painting
after the end of art history, jazz continues without a history. Narrative
history is supplanted by chronology.

III
In order to position the Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s as the
culmination of jazz history, Burns and Ward must discredit two rival jazz
movements. Although both the avant-garde and the electronic hybrid
of fusion might appear to constitute progress in the evolution of jazz,
Burns and Ward systematically dismiss both movements as non-
progressive mutations. The avant-garde movement was too radical and
too close to absolute music. Fusion took jazz backwards toward mere
entertainment.
Consider the free jazz of Ornette Colemans quartet of 195860.
Sympathetic descriptions portray it as improvisational music in which
each player individualizes the music while simultaneously responding
to the free choices of the other musicians. Given the ideal of American
democracy at the heart of the Burns/Ward history, Colemans quartet
has some claim to the mantle of achievement assigned to the Miles
Davis quintet. Yet Ornette Coleman is one of only three musicians in
the ten episodes of Jazz to receive extended overt scorn and abuse from
other jazz musicians. The narration emphasizes that most bebop
180 Philosophy and Literature

musicians scorned Colemans quartet. (To put it in perspective, Cecil

Taylor also receives abuse, but less than Coleman. And of course Miles
Davis is berated for his fusion period.) Miles Davis calls Coleman all
screwed up and Albert Murray dismisses free jazz as absolutely self-
indulgent. Murray contends that Colemans quartet represents novelty
without attaining the status of progressive, avant-garde art. Free jazz is
neither art nor jazz, argues Murray, because What is freer than jazz? . . .
once you say jazz, the whole thing is about freedom, American free-
dom, but Colemans music mistakenly embraces chaos.20 Wynton
Marsalis compares it to the babbling of infants.21
By heaping scorn on free jazz, the project undercuts the potential
signicance of Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, and Don Cherry
playing jazz after the dissolution of Colemans classic quartet. It seems
that we need Miles Davis as the pinnacle of jazz as American democracy
because Miles Davis is unquestionably of the mainstream tradition
(Ornette Coleman is not) and thus Daviss subsequent sell-out with
fusion offers a more satisfying account of jazz pluralism in the wake of
that culmination. Episode Ten argues that because Davis debased his
art in order to regain the mass audience, players who remain uncor-
rupted and who accept limited fame and fortune are now free to pursue
any mode of jazz. While Miles Daviss move to fusion signals the end of
jazz history as a genuine development of the tradition, the resulting
pluralism is simultaneously validated by the dichotomy embodied in
Daviss career.
Along with the scorn of the Marsalis brothers, Herbie Hancock is
brought forth to explain why Daviss fusion work is a repudiation of the
democracy of jazz. The quintet was great, Hancock begins, because
Miles

was able to bring out everybodys individuality within the framework of

his own vision. [It] fell apart with the fusion bands, because there was too
much going on and too much of people not listening to each other. So
instead of being the kind of challenge that jazz normally is when people
are listening to each other and trying to solo and complement at the
same time, it just became playing tennis without a net.22

Daviss fusion years illustrate the tension between entertainment

values and art status that informs the trajectory of jazz history.23 The
project assumes that the two are mutually exclusive, but the contrast is
never explained. Nonetheless, Episode Ten is constructed so that the
 Theodore Gracyk 181

lesson of Davis in his nal decades is that the pursuit of mass

acceptance is a debasement of art. Jazz now represents less than three
percent of the music industry in the United States, but this is treated as
evidence of the musics artistic health: it can only be good for the
music when the musicians give up Daviss foolish desire for fame and
wealth.24
It seems that we need Miles Davis as the pinnacle of jazz as American
democracy because Daviss subsequent move to fusion conclusively
signals the end of jazz history, for it ends the genuine development of
the core tradition. The Burns/Ward narrative is constructed so that a
single man is there with Charlie Parker at the attainment of full art
status for jazz, that same musician controls his demons and fuses that
art status with the democratic ideal, and then, having exhausted jazz,
that same musician returns full circle to our starting point by repudiat-
ing jazz by embracing novelty and entertainment values. Miles Davis
embodies the career choice that must be faced by every future
practitioner of the art of jazz. Episode Ten argues that because Davis
debased his art in order to regain the mass audience, players who do
not sell out and who accept limited fame and fortune are now free to
pursue any mode of jazz. True jazz can still be distinguished from fake
jazz even during post-historical pluralism, because the distinction has
been validated by the dichotomy embodied in Daviss career. Today,
true jazz is created when the musicians pursue historically informed
personal expression without stooping to introduce entertainment values
that appeal to a mass audience.

IV
The irony here is that the picture of democracy that emerges is that
of the New England town-hall meeting, a democracy in which every
participant listens to every other participant. I can only respect the
choices of my neighbor because I so intimately know my neighbor. This
is not the democracy of hundreds of millions of participants. Fusion
cannot be jazz because the players cannot hear one another and so the
players lack the proper empathy to negotiate their individual decisions.
It also appears that the ideal of American democracy is a meritocracy,
suspicious of the mob and thus more sympathetic to Platos Republic
than to James Madisons pragmatic solution to competing factions in
the tenth Federalist Paper.
Jazzs antipathy to democracy emerges most strongly within a very
182 Philosophy and Literature

odd sequence in the closing minutes of the lm. This sequence

explicates the theme that jazz died and yet survived its death. The year
is 1976. Dexter Gordon returns to New York following fourteen years of
European exile and he nds that there is still an American audience for
acoustic jazz. The narrator solemnly intones, there was still an audi-
ence, that is, an audience for true jazz. What is striking is that the
remaining interviews and footage are constructed to persuade us that
the audience is now irrelevant.
The sequence in Episode Ten continues with yet another premise.
The assumption that jazz has a history because it evolves is bolstered by
the idea that its evolution necessitates repudiation of accessibility and
of popular taste. Two different gures (Stanley Crouch and a jazz
student) voice the idea that contemporary jazz remains important
because it offers an alternative to mainstream popular music; its an
alternative to whats on the radio, including jazz radio.25 Miles Davis
demonstrated that good jazz could no longer attain real popularity (of
the level of Madonna or rap stars). Daviss subsequent debasement of
his art in a bid for popularity serves as a cautionary model, placing
limits on the motives of jazz musicians in a way that can only be good
for jazz, opines Stanley Crouch. We have moved beyond the projects
earlier premise that there are two species of jazz musician, the popular-
izer and the innovator. Episode Ten generalizes an idea that rst arose
in Episode Eight, the idea that bebop was a natural evolution of jazz but
its values are antithetical to popular acceptance. The musics post-
historical survival demands a continuing disdain for its popular
acceptance.
The obvious objection is that we can grant the validity of a history but
posit something else that needs to be explained. Instead of the
democracy thesis and the attainment of art status, it might be more
interesting to explain why the most popular music of one era became so
marginalized within American society. Is this a demonstration of the
ckle nature of democracy? We again get a possible end of jazz story.
But now the end is containment and marginalization, not attainment of
its essence. Following Douglas Crimp on art and the museum, we might
ask whether the institutional recognition of an alleged universal value
of jazz is really a denial of its continued cultural and social signi-
cance.26 From this perspective, the trajectory that alienates the popular
audience is less a triumph of art than it is a triumph of larger cultural
forces, neutralizing the possibility of an arts revolutionary praxis or
resistance and depriving it of agency in everyday cultural interac-
 Theodore Gracyk 183

tions.27 Several of the interviews conducted by Ken Burns emphasize

that jazz was a radical social experiment, for the popularity of jazz
forced many racist whites to recognize the irrationality of the stereo-
types theyd internalized. The interviews do not explore the idea that
when jazz evolves into high culture, it abdicates its power to offer public
social critique of racial inequalities.
Aware that important distinctions exist among the many products of
popular and mass art, so that we no longer have to choose between art
and mass art, we might regard the tired opposition of amusement and
art as the villain that marginalized jazz. Many of us also believe that
good art is open to multiple interpretations and uses. Those uses
include recreation and entertainment, the price of which is that the
audience response is sometimes supercial. Louis Armstrong aside,
many jazz musicians have believed that their status as an artist depends
on depriving their art of all entertainment value. Limiting the audience
is taken as evidence of artistic merit. This belief reaches a certain
critical mass in the 1940s when bebop musicians and jazz critics seem to
have been delighted at the shrinking of the audience. But the loss of
the audience need not signal artistic progress. In some cases it merely
follows from the contingency that another style has attracted the
interest of that segment of the audience, as Burns and Ward seem to
allow when accounting for the dissolution of the big bands.28
Until this point, the lm has been permeated with visual images of
people dancing. I am reminded of Roger Scrutons position that
dancing is the most fundamental response to music.29 Earlier jazz
musicians certainly looked to the audience for some physical response.
Louis Armstrong is heard to say, Anything you can pat your foot to it,
its good music.30 Episode Nine even argues that Duke Ellington kept
Paul Gonsalves going for twenty-seven choruses at the 1956 Newport
Jazz Festival because one woman got up to dance. Bebop puts an end to
it. Branford Marsalis is proud to say that bebop musicians took a
principled stand: We are no longer going to play entertainment . . .
They damn sure arent going to dance to it.31 Jazz shows us the seated
audience and the signs in the clubs prohibiting dancing. This loss of
dance represents an end to jazzs integration into the daily life of most
Americans. But a stronger conclusion might be drawn: the loss of the
dance function represents a repudiation of the democratic ideal.32
Wynton Marsalis is prominently featured throughout the project,
emphasizing that the democracy thesis is realized in the process of
negotiation and collaboration that occurs among the musicians. But
184 Philosophy and Literature

why is the democratic community restricted to the musicians? Why are

they the only relevant participants in the project? We face the very basic
question of whether the musics relationship to its audience is essential
to deciding the content of that idea. R. G. Collingwood is rightly
criticized for the overt idealism of Book I of The Principles of Art. But
Book III offers a corrective in the argument that art as language
requires an audience. Collingwoods argument is sketchy, but it seems
to anticipate Wittgensteins private language argument of the Philosophi-
cal Investigations. The artist cannot determine what a work of art
communicates if the work of art is not available for the response of an
audience that is competent in the same language.33 The problem, then,
is whether that audience is to be restricted to other artists. Or do we
insist on an audience of non-musicians to check the self-validation that
arises within a community of like-minded artists? Or do we suppose that
different musics demand different audiences (do we concede that a
musicians musician like Charlie Parker needs only his peers)? My own
suggestion is that the philosophical point that language is a public
matter must be supplemented by the empirical question of who
understands a given language.
Although I do not fully endorse the analogy of art as language,34
there are syntactic and semantic aspects of bebop and free jazz that
most of the audience will never grasp. But is that surprising? Many
literate people do not grasp either the plain meaning or the deeper
signicance of James Joyces Ulysses, much less Finnegans Wake. But a
larger audience is capable of understanding the stories of Dubliners. It
doesnt follow that Dubliners is less a work of literary art. But if the
artists relationship to the audience is a mode of collaboration, as
Collingwood insists, and if there are somewhat different audiences for
Ulysses and Dubliners, then the accessibility of the latter is no cause to
suspect that it is not art. Furthermore, it is always easier to secure
empathy with your audience when the audience is limited to those of
like mind. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington embody the democ-
racy thesis more fully than Charlie Parker and Miles Davis do, for
Armstrong and Ellington insisted on treating a diverse mass audience
as participants in the musical project. If I hear a sigh of pleasure from
the dance oor, Ellington remarked, it becomes part of our music.35
The musicians interact with each other and with the audience and the
audience interacts with the musicians and with each other. Whats so
wrong with that? A musical tradition that intentionally excludes broad
participation is hardly to be embraced as a successful embodiment of
 Theodore Gracyk 185

American democracy. While I have expressed concerns about the

democracy thesis, I endorse Wynton Marsaliss claim that jazz succeeds
when the music strikes a balance between musical sophistication and
accessibility.36
If there are serious obstacles to reconciling high art status with the
democracy thesis, it is possible that a different internal direction
guides the Burns/Ward narrative. Despite its prominence, the democ-
racy thesis actually plays a marginal role in organizing their material.
The narrative ultimately relies on the standard ideology of music that
has come to dominate thinking about music.37 The central principle of
that ideology is the idea that a continuing tradition naturally progresses
toward ever-greater complexity: the great gures march relentlessly
forward, constantly making the musical language more complex.38 If
this idea has been put to dubious use to construct a unied historical
narrative of the European tradition that takes us from Bach to
Schoenbergs atonality, it is all the more likely to distort history when
applied to popular forms of music.
Burns and Ward construct a narrative that attempts to accommodate
the democracy thesis, an ideology of musical progress, the expression
theory of art, and a standard opposition of art and commercial
entertainment. I have argued that they attempt to reconcile the
consequent tensions by ending their narrative in the mid-1960s while
posting a post-historical pluralism for the subsequent thirty-ve years of
jazz. The resulting story is incoherent. I believe that a more satisfying
jazz history might be constructed by retaining the democracy thesis
while giving up on the other three assumptions. (An expression
account will certainly apply to a great deal of jazz, but not all of it. But
that argument cannot be made here.) The price of abandoning those
assumptions is that the history of jazz will be a messy chronological
history.

Minnesota State University Moorehead

1. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of Americas Music (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2000); hereafter abbreviated J:HAM. In contrast, Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns is
hereafter abbreviated Jazz. The ten episodes of Jazz correspond to the ten chapters of the
book, but each incorporates material that the other lacks.
186 Philosophy and Literature
2. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz, Episode 10. The same passage by Marsalis is the concluding
passage of the book; J:HAM, p. 460. See his words in context at Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns
Page. Public Broadcasting System. Access date 21 September 2001. Wynton Marsalis
interview, p. 27 <http://www.pbs.org/jazz/about/about_transcripts.htm>; hereafter ab-
breviated www.pbs.
3. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz, Episode 10 (my transcription). Cornel West takes this idea to
an extreme in holding that jazz designates not a type of music but rather a mode of
being in the world, characteristic of black life, for which the music is a metaphor.
Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 150.
4. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz, Episode 1 (my transcription). Taken literally, this description
excludes the tremendous body of solo piano work from counting as proper jazz.
5. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 60.
6. Kathleen Marie Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1991), pp. 17780.
7. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnams, 1934; rpt. 1958), p. 36.
8. Arthur Danto, The End of Art, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 81115.
9. Arthur Danto, The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense, History and Theory 37.4
(1998): 127. See also Nol Carroll, The End of Art? History and Theory 37.4 (1998): 1729.
10. Gary Giddens, Jazz, Episode 9 (my transcription).
11. Joshua Redman and Michael Cuscuna, Jazz, Episode 9. Redmans comments
appear in the book; J:HAM, p. 437. As in the lm, Cuscuna is then quoted (but saying
something else) in order to seal the argument that Daviss quintet was superior to
Ornette Colemans free jazz: This was the real free jazz ( J:HAM, p. 437).
12. J:HAM, p. 380.
13. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
14. Danto, The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense, p. 139.
15. J:HAM, p. 448.
16. Branford Marsalis, Jazz, Episode 10. In the interview Marsalis blames fusion for this
death, whereas Davis claimed that fusion was necessary because jazz had died. See
Branford Marsalis interview, www.pbs, p. 10.
17. Joshua Redman, www.pbs, p. 4.
18. Joshua Redman, Jazz, Episode 10. See also Redman interview, www.pbs, p. 5.
19. Danto explicitly links the expression theory with individuality, where expression
theory serves as a justication for abandonment of the larger, progressive project.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 104.
20. Albert Murray, Jazz, Episode 9. Portions of the interview are transcribed and
reproduced in the book; J:HAM, p. 343.
 Theodore Gracyk 187
21. Wynton Marsalis interview, www.pbs, p. 24.
22. Herbie Hancock, Jazz, Episode 10 (my transcription). The book marshals a full
page of insults against Daviss fusion period; J:HAM, p. 448.
23. Branford Marsalis makes some interesting points about Daviss fusion years. He
argues that there was insufcient money to regard it as going for the bucks, and Daviss
true reason to abandon jazz was to be the undisputed leader of the bad boys,
something no longer possible in jazz. Branford Marsalis interview, www.pbs, p. 30.
24. Stanley Crouch, Jazz, Episode 10 (my transcription).
25. Branford Marsalis interview, www.pbs, p. 10.
26. Douglas Crimp, On the Museums Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). See also
Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 1045.
27. Crimp, p. 303. One of the primary signs of an institutionalization of jazz is the very
documentary that we are discussing. I do not subscribe to Adornos position that musics
political signicance depends on its social isolation. See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy
of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury
Press, 1973), e.g., pp. 9, 115.
28. J:HAM, pp. 33738, 35859.
29. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.
35557.
30. Louis Armstrong, Jazz, Episode 2 (my transcription).
31. Branford Marsalis, Say It Loud! Black Music in America, VH1 Television/Rhino
Entertainment, Episode 1 (Keep on Pushin: Politics and Protest), aired on VH1 Television,
7 October 2001 (my transcription).
32. See Jacqui Malone, Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands, in The Jazz
Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. OMeally (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), pp. 27897. Malone argues that beginning in 1944 new tax laws inuenced
club owners to ban dancing.
33. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp.
30911.
34. See G. L. Hagberg, Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
35. Quoted in J:HAM, p. 370.
36. J:HAM, p. 116.
37. For the argument that ideology distorts all recent histories of jazz, see Scott
Deveaux, Constructing the Jazz Tradition, in OMeally, pp. 483512.
38. R. A. Sharpe, Music and Humanism: An Essay in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 200. For Sharpes full account of this ideology and
reasons to regard it as a distortion of history, see chapter 7, pp. 179208.