Fascinating Rhythms

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Burns is a historian working on film, however, not a prophet. Despite the huge number of jazz reissues carrying the series' imprimatur that are currently weighing down the record racks, neither is he a promo guy flacking for the future. His object is not to move CDs, but hearts. He means to reinvigorate the American imagination with the glories of this music, and at the same time, to remind and warn viewers that jazz was born out of a fierce challenge to the abiding shame of American racism. If that means looking back longer than looking forward, then that's the way it should be, and that's the way Burns and Ward let it play out. Besides, with Armstrong playing Star Dust, or Young taking a solo, or Holiday singing Strange Fruit, the weight of history goes airborne. Jazz becomes, like the title of that Holiday classic, fine and mellow.

Always fine, anyway. But not invariably mellow, especially when it uses jazz with unapologetic heat to place black history at the vital center of American culture. Burns is relentless on the subject. He has spoken loudly and often about how racism is the thread that binds Jazz together with his previous large-scale work. He and his onscreen docents, like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the critics Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch, easily weave the story of the music not only together with history but also with conventional cultural tradition. Mozart and Shakespeare are cited as cultural touchstones for the giants of jazz; the narration refers to Ellington as "America's greatest composer," an accolade that may well be deserved but which even the Duke might have found, however satisfying, a little exclusionary.

Marsalis particularly can lay down the jazz gospel with an evangelical fervor, and Burns gives him plenty of time at the pulpit. Probably too much. It would certainly have been better, for instance, to hear directly from some of the musicians who helped make the history besides Ellington or Basie rather than have Marsalis evoking times he never experienced, even if you can practically see the tongue of fire over his head when he speaks. But Jazz's seventh and finest episode, Dedicated to Chaos, which chronicles the beginnings of the bebop revolution as well as the coming of hard drugs and the deepening scar of racism, eases away at the end on a note of shattering simplicity. Dave Brubeck, whose music, buttressed by the suave and inventive sax of Paul Desmond, is an important rediscovery here, recounts a childhood incident of racial revelation that leaves him weeping. It is an unforgettable anecdote and lays open the conscience as it touches the soul--just the way that much of jazz can do, with a flourish or a solo or an act of lyrical surprise.

Brubeck. Marsalis. Miles and Duke and Louis and Lady Day and Count Basie and Bird and Prez, and Benny Goodman too: it's folly to rank on Burns for spending so much time on these looming figures because, at the last, they are the ones who made the history he is setting down here. Writer Ward has compared the various warring partisans of jazz to a dysfunctional family, and all the sniping and complaining about short shrift for today's talent miss the mark that he and Burns aimed for. They are laying a foundation, making this music, whether it's as old as Armstrong's Hot Fives from the '20s or Davis' Kind of Blue from the '50s, not only alive again but also audacious again. Liberating. The sound of perpetual American promise.

But of course it's Ellington who said it best. "If it sounds good," he said about music, "it is good." That definition should stand and serve here too. Nothing else on television has ever sounded as good as Jazz.