It’s Got That Swing

This joint is jumpin’.

The occasion is another Ken Burns film as dressed to the nines as the old Cotton Club. “Jazz” is that rare documentary viewers can dance to, 18 hours of ragtiming, Lindy hopping, slow-dragging, two-stepping, turkey trotting, bunny hopping, Savoy stomping, jitterbugging, bebopping, one o’clock-jumping, Jelly Rolling, Fats Wallering, Charlie Parkering, Satchmoing musicology for the masses.

On the screen, Louis Armstrong’s career is exploding like Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks. Ethel Waters is singing bawdy blues. Benny Goodman is playing us into the swing era. Artie Shaw is putting down popular Glenn Miller’s “Republican band” and calling him “the Lawrence Welk of jazz.” Count Basie and his Barons of Rhythm are on a tear in Kansas City. Miles Davis is going electronic. And Duke Ellington is being asked to name the favorite of his tunes. “The one coming up tomorrow,” he replies.

“Jazz” and its rich histories of riffing, scatting, night-jamming artists, crowded dance halls and swinging orchestras surface on PBS like a musical Lazarus bursting from a buried archive of antique footage to confront a culture in which a band today can be three acoustic guitarists who sing like chain saws. Some of the pictures alone are extraordinary.

True jazzers will fastidiously note and fight about this documentary’s musical choices, omissions and punctuation, arcane and otherwise, the way English teachers intricately diagramed sentences for the teen bobby-soxers seen palpitating over clarinetist Shaw in the late 1930s. And, too, just as big band combat itself is a driving pulse beat here, with tiny Chick Webb against Goodman, and Webb against big-swinging Basie among the highlights of this remarkable 10-part work that chronologically spans the last century of America’s music.

There is plenty to debate, including a decision to use up nine installments of “Jazz” on the first 60 years and wee deebie-deebie da across the last 40 in just one melancholy hour and 48 minutes. What is that all about?

As history theater, though, “Jazz” starts on a high note that it breathlessly holds almost through the final credits. When it swings--its colorful virtuosos queuing up to elevate jazz from raw energy to art--you swoon, whether hearing contrasting sax men Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young or hard-playing, hard-drinking Waller and near-sightless Art Tatum at their pianos. “When Art Tatum played ‘Three Little Words,’ ” someone says, “it was more like three thousand words.”

Speaking of words, what exactly is jazz? Prepare for dueling definitions. Whatever it is, at the forefront of its cosmos here is one man. The biggest revelation for casual devotees surely will be the transcendence of Armstrong as jazz deity by acclamation, described as making decades of influential horn history in New Orleans, Chicago and New York, his playing likened to what Albert Einstein said about nearing the speed of light. Musician Matt Glaser: “And Louie had figured out in his gut somewhere, the faster you go, the more relaxed you can be.”

Even more, Armstrong created a new singing vocabulary, Wynton Marsalis, the composer and celebrated trumpeter of this generation, says here in his capacity as senior consultant. When speaking of Armstrong, Marsalis lights up like Lincoln Center, where he is creative director. Critic Gary Giddens goes further, titling Armstrong “the most influential singer American music has ever produced.”

This will surprise those recalling the later “Pops” mainly as a brow-mopping, head-cocking, grinning, mildly minstrelesque African American who resuscitated his career in the early 1960s when rasping “Hello, Dolly” with more teeth than voice. A much wider story of Armstrong is told by Burns, his longtime collaborator Lynn Novick and writer Geoffrey C. Ward, along with the scholars, writers, musicians and others who speak on camera.

Sharing this penthouse with Armstrong through much of “Jazz” is Edward Kennedy Ellington, the great composer and bandleader. He is already debonair enough to be known as Duke when we meet him in the 1920s during Prohibition, all slicked back, top-hatted and jazzed for creating music that at once would drive dancing feet and carry the elegant, sensual ambience of late-night cocktails after a night on the town.

How great was Ellington? Perhaps not this great. A French critic is quoted here as calling his music “not only a new art form, but a new reason for living.” Critics--what’s to be done with them?

However luminous were Ellington and other African Americans who originated, played and sang jazz to the hilt--inspiring Goodman and other white musicians to follow in their footsteps--they still couldn’t cut it as equals, according to most of their fellow Americans of the time. Whites kept them tightly under thumb in a society whose pervasive segregation extended even to the composition of bands. If jazz was colorblind, the country wasn’t, affirmed by the famed Cotton Club, for example, where mobsters and maestros, but not races mixed in a trendy spot whose high-tone black entertainers were unwelcome at the front door as patrons.

As he did less fruitfully in 18 sleepy hours of “Baseball,” Burns broadens his topic into a metaphor for the nation that gave it life. Narrator Keith David speaks of blues flowing from slavery into what would become known as jazz. Joined with race at the heartbeat, this music is seen here as being as American as . . . lynching. And never more searingly than in “Strange Fruit,” whose amazing lyrics (“the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth . . . and the sudden smell of burning flesh”) Billie Holiday sings in 1939 at a New York club filled with eerily silent whites.

There is something uplifting about an art form that thrives even in hard times, as we see jazz doing here during the Depression, when many Americans exchange dancing shoes for cardboard shoes, but keep on dancing anyway.

Yet about the documentary’s curious ending.

“Jazz” invests so much in Armstrong and Ellington that their deaths in 1971 and 1974 respectively--about midway through the final installment--create the kind of void you’d get from a drum solo without a drummer. What follows is a low hum of optimism about jazz’s future, capped by Marsalis promising, “We still swingin’.” If so, why hasn’t this A Train the juice to suitably complete the last years of its scheduled journey?

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* “Jazz” begins tonight at 9 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV. The remaining installments continue at 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, then through January on the 15th, 17th, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 29th and concluding on the 31st. The network ratings vary by episode. The series will be simulcast on jazz station KLON-FM (88.1).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.

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Inside

* Don Heckman looks at “Jazz” from a musical perspective. F13