Hi all,
Unfortunately I didnt get home to catch the first episode of Jazz, but I
did see Ken Burns and Wynton marsalis on Charlie Rose later last night.
I found that both Burns and Marsalis spoke with incredible passion and
vigor about what it means to them to have made this documentary, and the
significance of jazz as the greatest musical contribution america has made
to the world ( lets see what they say about hip hop in 50 yrs :P). The
whole thing is definitely a labor of love and not a commercial venture,
which immediately increases its credibility thousandfold.
Anyway, I'm just writing to relay to you something Burns said, which may
answer the issue raised yesterday about not including enough post 1960
in the Documentary. Burns said that he didnt include any
info after 1975 because it is too near to us, and he is a historian, and
all of that material is stuff that's happening and still happening, not
history.
From that perspective I really see where he is comin from and in fact I'm
quite happy learning about the greats of the big band era, because I'm not
about to start collecting big band records, but I definitely have enough
of the bop+beyond records to learn that stuff on my own.
They said that they were going to air the whole thing start to finish this
saturday.... sounds like I'm stayin in...
one other nice thing about the Charlie rose thing was, the last video clip
that they showed, Ron Carter with MC Solaar at Red Hot & Cool...
Viva acid jazz!
Nat
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jan 09 2001 - 17:30:49 CET