Burns's sprawling, ten-part documentary Jazz (pbs, 2001) was a watershed cultural event that helped to rekindle long-standing debates about the cultural politics of music, race, and nationality. Backed by major contributions from corporate behemoths such as Starbucks and Amazon, the series brought jazz back into the national spotlight and, however temporarily, helped to make the music commercially viable again after a nearly four-decade decline. The opening episode alone reached an estimated thirteen million viewers; books, cds, dvds, and related merchandise eventually generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. 1 As with the case of Burns's previous proj ects The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994), the series allowed US public tele vi sion to reassert itself as an essentially patriotic enterprise. 2 Beautifully produced and epic in scope, Jazz painted a moving portrait of African Americans' triumph over adversity, consecrating the music as a symbol of the uniquely demo cratic ethos of the United States. But something was clearly amiss with Burns's brand of storytelling. With its technically sophisticated yet po liti cally simplistic approach to the topic, Jazz was more a coronation of "Amer i ca's classical music" and "Amer i ca's art form" than a true cele bration of demo cratic diversity, let alone a balanced account Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/672584/9780822372332-001.pdf by guest of the per sis tent racial strug gles, economic exploitation, and transnational complexities of jazz history. 3 In spite of a general consensus about the contributions of jazz icons like Armstrong, Ellington, and Parker, whom Burns extolled, many critics bluntly denounced the omission or reduction of key secondary figures, especially Latin American musicians. Ben Ratliff complained in his New York Times review that the documentary was "stubbornly Americanist" in overlooking Africa, Cuba, and the Ca rib bean. He added, "That there's little more than a peep of Latin jazz since the 1940's is weird indeed." 4 In a damning article published in Jazz Times, Bobby Sanabria stressed the importance of recognizing influential musicians not often mentioned by mainstream jazz critics. Citing Burns's omission of Tito Puente, the Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría, and the legendary Nuyoricans Eddie Palmieri and Willie Bobo, Sanabria lamented that "in terms of jazz history, we basically didn't exist." 5 Clearly, for jazz to be sold to US audiences on a massive scale, the music needed first to be branded as quintessentially American. In a maneuver that cloaked overarching nationalist imperatives, in other words, Burns had sold a nostalgic, reductive vision of jazz to a US public eager for redeeming, black-and-white narratives about the nation's recent past. The undeniably protectionist slant of Burns's Jazz therefore should not be seen as simple negligence. On the contrary, the exclusion of Latin Amer i ca from the grand narrative of jazz was the main price to be paid in order to claim the music as a n...
