one of my little projects over my break has been to try to learn the history of jazz. so one thing was the ken burns series from 2001: twenty hours of astonishing material. i am learning a lot of course. wynton marsalis, who is a producer and probably the main talking head, is a supremely articulate person: so profound but so sincere, and of course so knowledgeable. stanley crouch is the most feet-on-the-ground of the interpreters: he says 'look, you've got to understand that sidney bechet started a gunfight in paris at rush hour. usually you want your gunfights to be as late as possible, so that people will not see you." the gunfight supposedly was with another musician over whether d-flat really was the right chord.

but let me say what i think goes wrong. we need our legends and our heroes and our coherent narratives. and we need our interpreters, including intellectuals. but what you don't want to do is lose the reality, the humanness, the music. everything has to be almost insanely important i guess to attract viewers etc and everything changes america forever, was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. gerald early gives you the impression that armstrong was carefully reading the essays of emerson so that he could embody america in all its profusion. every note is the suffering and transcendence of some national actor or something. matt glaser gives a nice example, speculating that werner heisenberg was in the audience when louis played oslo and then saying: armstrong gives us a new theory of time and space and man's place in the cosmos. shit man in your anxiety to legitimate this stuff - which has already been so utterly legitimated - you really just lose the whole thing. man he's blowing that horn so people will dance and stuff! geez. to be great music, to be be deep and delightful music, to be new music: let's start with that. it's plenty!

marsalis says so many beautiful things about armstrong: he combined the deepest human feeling with the greatest musical skill. right! but the mythmaking just gets to be too much: marsalis basically speculates that little louis didn't have to learn or practice: the first time he picked up a cornet at the colored waifs home he sounded great. well it's the same kind of myth of a jackson pollock or something: he just is. but then you're really in danger of losing that human connection, not to mention the hard work. look i guess i'd much rather do this with armstrong or duke ellington than some of the crazy candidates (beatles or dylan, e.g.). but let's keep louis armstrong here, with us. a person, a finite real person, did these things. louis does very interesting things with time, but he does them literally in time with actual time, and he is at play. the music is great enough. it sounds so deep, but after the thirtieth repetition you sort of realize that embodying the very essence of america doesn't actually explain anything.