Burns Sometimes Leaves the Music Behind

Last July, when I asked Ken Burns about the critical responses that would surface when “Jazz” was aired, his response was to shrug and say, “My congregation is a broad national audience.”

Well, sure. When you’ve already produced such hit documentaries as “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” it’s easy to take a grandiose view. But here’s the rub: “The Civil War” was about documentation, and there was plenty to choose from. And baseball, at its core, comes down to to measurable standards of achievement.

But jazz is far more elusive. Like other art forms, its primary appeal is that it is not measurable--after-the-fact documentation is simply the record that remains of a one-time-only, inimitable action that has taken place.

Which makes the chronicling of jazz a vastly more difficult task. Unless, that is, one avoids dealing with the random unpredictabilities of acts of creation by concentrating upon the lives of the individual creators, especially the most important ones--in the case of jazz with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis--and the unfolding social milieus that surrounded them.

In that sense, “Jazz” is undeniably intriguing. As usual, Burns’ team has done a masterful job of stitching together still photos, film footage, interviews and a rich flow of music. The result is an overview, from a Great Man perspective, of jazz in America as an historical phenomenon.

But in the process, Burns’ effort to position the music as the soundtrack of America, to display it as the creative outlet of the improvisational spirit that he feels is at the heart of American society, tends to subordinate two important elements: the music itself, and how it is made.

Obliged to provide a stream of visual images, eager to hold the attention of an audience accustomed to fast-paced editing, he rarely allows his focus to remain on a complete performance.

A particularly jarring example: Episode 9 includes a classic clip from the 1957 program “The Sound of Jazz,” in which Lester Young is playing a remarkable blues chorus. The camera cuts away to Billie Holiday, watching with passionate intensity, reflections of their complex relationship in her eyes. But, rather than allow the striking images and the extraordinary playing to stand on its own, a voice-over is brought in before the piece can reach its natural conclusion.

Similarly, aside from using the word “improvisation” as an all-embracing description of the American way of doing things, there is very little effort to explore its real essence in jazz. Only on one or two occasions does the series shine a small beam of light upon the magical, mysterious process that takes place when a jazz artist leaps into the unknown territory of an improvised solo.

Burns is right, of course, in his reference to his “broad national audience.” He’s got it, and one can hardly question the overall beneficial effect that “Jazz” will have in terms of spreading the word about the great beauty of the music. But one still would have hoped for a better showcase for the music itself.