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Issue date: January 7, 200
All that
Jazz
As a special preview,
TV's most famous historian, Ken Burns, goes out on a limb exclusively
for USA WEEKEND to rank the world-class artists he celebrates in
his latest PBS documentary, "Jazz."
By Ken Burns
Despite the fact
that it is the only art form ever invented by Americans, jazz, for
many of us, seems a distant, almost esoteric subject far removed
from the concerns of our daily lives, a music that might even require
some advanced degree to fully understand. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Starting Monday, PBS will begin broadcasting Jazz, a 10-part documentary
on the joyous, toe-tapping sound that goes to the soul of who we
are. Our film is also about two world wars and a devastating Depression
-- the soundtrack that got us through those tough times. It's about
sex -- the way women and men communicate and negotiate the complicated
rituals of courtship. It's about drugs -- and the terrible cost
of addiction. It's about great cities -- their growth and decay
and rebirth. And it is about race and civil rights -- the ongoing
struggle for justice in the United States. But mark my words: This
is not homework. Mostly, this film is about wonderful music, the
pulse of America and the remarkable individuals who brought this
sound to the rest of us. USA WEEKEND Magazine asked me to come up
with a list of the 10 best musicians in the history of jazz. Now,
making lists is a dangerous thing that always gets you into trouble,
because somebody's favorite is left out. But lists foster debate
and get people thinking and arguing. (I expect the reaction to be
quite vociferous, because we've chosen in our series to focus on
the first 75 years of jazz -- 1900 to 1975 -- and not the last 25,
where the stories are ongoing and the arguments about who's good
and who isn't have not been resolved.) So here goes -- my list of
the 10 best jazz artists, culminating in the most influential:
10.
Count Basie. At the height of the Swing Era in
the mid- to late 1930s, jazz represented 70% of the music business,
but some musicians found the big bands too stiff, too regimented.
They charged that swing had become too commercial, that it stifled
improvisation and self-expression -- the very thing that distinguishes
jazz -- and took the music in the wrong direction. Some musicians,
such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, abandoned the big bands
altogether, but nearly all agreed that swing needed help. That help
came from a wonderfully creative source -- the propulsive sound
of William James Basie and his remarkable band. Basie was steeped
in the Kansas City blues style of swing that relied on what were
called "riffs": arrangements that were rarely written down but that
provided the foundation for his musicians to improvise all night
long. "A band can really swing when it swings easy," Count Basie
believed, "when it can play along like cutting butter." Even a single
note, he said, can swing. His band was filled with jazz geniuses,
including trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, saxophonist Lester Young
and drummer Jo Jones. They were an immediate hit across the country,
epitomizing what the writer Albert Murray told us was "the velocity
of celebration."
9.
Thelonius Monk. No more mysterious man ever played
jazz than the great pianist Thelonius Sphere Monk, and few have
created more memorable music. Along with Duke Ellington and Charles
Mingus, he is one of the three great composers in jazz. I suppose
he would be far better known if his persona had not been so rife
with peculiar eccentricities: He had his own distinctive dress and
wore funny hats onstage, he sometimes got up and danced in apparent
ecstasy, and he often refused to speak for days at a time. But he
left a body of work so stunning, so original, "so logical," Wynton
Marsalis told us, that no one can deny his central position in the
canon of jazz. There was wit and humor in his work, an infectious
complexity that invited in even the most casual listener, and his
audiences delighted in his search for the right note, played at
just the right moment. Monk played tunes so intricate, one saxophone
player remembered, that when his musicians got lost, it was "like
falling into an empty elevator shaft." Straight, No Chaser and Round
Midnight are his two best-known compositions, tunes that have become
jazz standards of nearly universal recognition and appeal.
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8.
Billie Holiday. Jazz has, since its beginnings,
been seen as a model of democracy, but until recent years it has
been mainly a man's world. The great exception has been female singers,
and Billie Holiday always has been the best, or at least the most
recognizable and influential. She didn't have great vocal range,
and she often sang mediocre pop songs, which in the hands of lesser
talents would have resulted in forgettable records. But Holiday
somehow endowed each effort with so much of herself, experimented
so relentlessly with rhythm and pacing, often singing "ahead of"
and "behind" the notes, that even the simplest of songs were turned
into great art. It usually takes only a syllable or two before you
know it is Holiday, and her version of Ellington's Solitude or her
dark anthem Strange Fruit are among the most beautiful tunes in
all of jazz. Her private life was filled with pain and anguish,
abuse and loneliness, but she was able to communicate those struggles
in her singing without self-pity and with such haunted grace that
her songs have an eternal quality.
7.
Benny Goodman. Jazz music was born in the African-American
community. But it is not black music, nor is it African music. It
is American music shared generously by those who first synthesized
it in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. And of all the
white musicians who heard jazz and were inexorably drawn to it,
no one had a greater influence on the country's widespread embrace
of that hot, infectious, danceable hybrid of jazz called swing than
the clarinetist and band leader Benny Goodman. Born into abject
poverty in the slums of Chicago, he willed himself to greatness:
studying jazz in Harlem clubs, working with black arrangers whose
music helped kick-start his career, finally helping to break down
racial barriers by integrating his band. Though Louis Armstrong,
Ellington and other black bands invented the big band swing sound,
Goodman helped spread it throughout the nation and soon was dubbed
the "King of Swing." With Goodman working at the same time as his
great rival and friend Artie Shaw, and others, jazz came as close
as it ever was to being America's most popular music.
6.
Dizzy Gillespie. In spite of his nickname, "Dizzy"
-- given for his wild, unpredictable onstage antics and the joy
with which he shared his abundant talent -- Gillespie was anything
but. With his trademark goatee, glasses and beret, he seemed the
epitome of the hipster jazz cat in the exciting, frenetic age that
followed World War II. But he was actually the intellectual master
and mentor of the new music he, Charlie Parker and others had begun
to explore during the early years of the war -- the sound that would
eventually be called bebop. Gillespie loved playing with Parker;
he once called him "the other half of my heartbeat," and he loved
the way bop allowed him to experiment with frantic tempos, fresh
harmonies, unfamiliar keys. Early in his life, he had developed
a fascination with theory and composition that never left him, and
he played the trumpet like no one else: with astonishing rhythmic
sophistication, and fast -- a fellow musician said, "like a rabbit
running over a hill." His cheeks puffed alarmingly when he played,
a condition now known to science as "Gillespie's Pouches," but with
the possible exception of Armstrong, no one was a better ambassador
for jazz, no one a more joyous practitioner of our unique art.
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5.
John Coltrane. Music for many people has been
an avenue to the spiritual life we all manifest in some fashion
or another. With the possible exception of Ellington, no other musician
has embraced that spirituality quite so positively, quite so confidently,
quite so powerfully as saxophonist John Coltrane. "The thing that's
always in John Coltrane," Marsalis told us, "is the lyrical shout
of the preacher in the heat and full fury of attempting to transform
the congregation." In 1964, Coltrane made one of the best-selling
jazz albums of the decade and one of the most influential records
of all time: the four-part devotional suite A Love Supreme. In 1966,
someone asked him what his plans were for the next decade. "To try
to become a saint," he replied. He died of cancer at age 40 the
following year, but there is in San Francisco in his still cherished
name the only church in America dedicated to a jazz musician.
4.
Miles Davis. No jazz artist has sold more albums
than Miles Davis, the once shy, nearly pretty son of a well-to-do
dentist from East St. Louis, Ill. His 1959 masterpiece, Kind of
Blue, is the best-selling jazz album of all time, appealing equally
to all races and both sexes. Davis' trumpet playing lacked the complicated
virtuosity and speed of Parker's sax, but he made up for it with
a tenderness and vulnerability unusual for a man and a jazz artist.
His style was overwhelmingly sensual and intimate, his trumpet sound
so recognizable that even those outside of jazz know when he's playing.
He would mask his own inner demons and insecurities with a belligerence
that symbolized the age, but for decades he was the most restless
of experimenters, embracing styles as diverse as bop, cool, modal,
avant-garde and fusion. There is no one else like him.
3.
Charlie Parker. The astonishingly talented saxophone
player many knew as "Bird" was a heroin addict from the time he
was 17, and in time that addiction and other vices would kill him
at age 34. But while he lived, he managed to transform jazz with
his stunning virtuosity and revolutionary style. He was, in his
own brief time in the spotlight, as innovative -- and almost as
influential -- as Louis Armstrong. Steeped in the Kansas City blues
tradition, he nonetheless forged his own way, eschewing established
concepts of melody and tempo and agreed-upon chord changes. The
musical style he helped to usher in -- bebop -- would push aside
the swing era and direct jazz away from the big band model and toward
the jam session. The result alienated some who found his music too
fast, too risky, too undanceable. But it drew a devoted and nearly
fanatic group of followers and like-minded musicians who would continue
to revere Parker's fierce experimentation right up to the present
day -- without ever equaling it.
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2.
Duke Ellington. With nearly 2,000 compositions
to his credit -- compositions suffused with the American experience
in the 20th century -- Edward Kennedy Ellington is our country's
greatest composer. Although he played the piano superbly, his true
"instrument" was the remarkable orchestra he kept on the road for
almost 50 years, experimenting and exploring, eliciting from that
complicated group of talented musicians songs and haunting melodies
that will endure and invoke powerful emotions for as long as there
is an America. He understood that over the course of our history,
the African-American community was a source of much of our artistic
inspiration, a testimony to affirmation in the face of adversity.
He believed passionately that he could mine that treasure trove
for his own art and then share it generously with people of all
colors. "I contend," he said, "that the Negro is creative America.
And it was a happy day when the first unhappy slave landed on its
shore."
1.
Louis Armstrong. Not only is Armstrong the most
important person in the history of jazz, but he's the most important
person in American music in the 20th century. In fact, he is to
music what the Wright Brothers are to travel. He embodies (and probably
invented) the utterly American concept of swinging. In the 1920s,
this larger-than-life trumpet player single-handedly turned jazz
into a soloist's art, changing forever the way every musician would
play his or her instrument. Then, as if this weren't enough, he
changed the way every singer would sing with his unmistakable voice,
influencing such diverse talents as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett
and Billie Holiday. But there is one other intangible ingredient
that cements his status and that, despite the overwhelming poverty
of his childhood in New Orleans, is the humanity of the man himself.
In dozens of interviews conducted for our film, critics, writers
and historians, musicians who played with him, and musicians today
who struggle with his legacy and friends and fans alike would all
concur about his musical greatness. But then, they would all say
Armstrong was "a gift from God" or an "angel." Let the debate begin.
Ken Burns is a contributing editor of USA WEEKEND Magazine.
The documentary filmmaker and historian's previous films include
The Civil War and Baseball. Jazz is a General
Motors Mark of Excellence Presentation.
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Thanks for entering to win a night
of jazz with Ken Burns in New York City
USA WEEKEND Magazine
will select one lucky reader and a guest to fly to New York City,
where they'll attend dinner and a jazz show with Burns on Wednesday,
May 2. Ten other readers will receive the The Best of Ken Burns'
Jazz soundtrack CD.
You must be 18
years of age or older at time of entry
THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED
RULES
No purchase necessary TO ENTER OR TO WIN. A purchase will not
increase your odds of winning. Void where prohibited. All federal,
state, local and municipal laws and regulations apply. Contest open
to U.S. residents (excluding residents of Puerto Rico) 18
years of age or older at time of entry. Contest
not open to employees of USA WEEKEND ("Sponsor"), the Gannett Co.
Inc., and affiliated companies and the immediate family members
of or persons domiciled with such employeess. To enter: complete
the online entry form. One entry per person. Sponsor is not responsible
for incomplete entries or for failure to receive entries due to
transmission failures or technical failures of any kind, including,
without limitation, malfunctioning of any network, hardware or software,
whether originating with Sponsor or sender.
All entries become the property of Sponsor. Contest begins 12:01
a.m. ET on Jan. 5, 2001, and all entries must be received by 11:59
p.m. ET on Jan. 21, 2001. Odds of winning depend on the number of
eligible entries received. One (1) Grand Prize Winner and ten (10)
First Prize Winners will be chosen at random from among all eligible
entries, on or about Feb. 15.
The Grand Prize Winner will win a night of jazz with Ken
Burns. Prize package includes round-trip coach-class airfare for
the winner and a guest to New York from the major airport closest
to the winner's home; one-night, double-occupancy, standard hotel
accommodations in New York; $400 in spending money for expenses
not included as part of the prize package; and an evening at a jazz
club for the winner and guest with Ken Burns (approximate retail
value: $2,000) on May 2, 2001.
Ten First Prize Winners will each receive The Best of
Ken Burns' JAZZ soundtrack CD (approximate retail value: $19).
Return of prize notification as undeliverable may result in disqualification,
and an alternate winner may be selected. Winner may waive the right
to receive a prize. Prize is non-assignable and non-transferable.
No substitutions allowed, except that prizes and individual components
of prize package are subject to availability, and Sponsor reserves
the right to substitute prizes of equal or greater value. Winners
are solely responsible for all taxes on prizes. Winners will be
contacted by telephone on or about March 1.
For a list of winners, available after April 1, send a self-addressed,
stamped envelope to: Jazz Night Contest, USA WEEKEND, 1000 Wilson
Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22229. By entering, participants agree to
be bound by these rules and the decisions of the judges, which are
final. Except where prohibited, participation in the contest constitutes
entrant's consent to the publication of his or her name, image and
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without limitation or further compensation. By entering the contest,
participants release USA WEEKEND, the Gannett Co., and each of their
respective affiliates, directors, officers, employees, representatives,
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in connection with, the contest.
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