RE: [tuning] Re: PBS TV "Jazz" series (yes, this is still on topi c!)

David Beardsley wrote,

>It shouldn't have been a film, it should be a TV series on PBS
>called Jazz Biography. After a year or two or three, they would
>get to the lesser known jazz greats and everyone wouldn't feel slighted.
>But if documentries have to be made, someone other than Burns should
>make

>Jazz II - Free Jazz: the musicans that Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, late
> period John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor influenced. Maybe
> the likes of Anthony Braxton, ACMM, the whole "Downtown"
> scene of NYC jazz and free improv could fit in here. Also
> the European influence, ie Evan Parker, Derek Bailey...

>Jazz III - Fusion: from Larry Coryell to Miles Davis and his sidemen
> who became band leaders - John McLaughlin, Chick Corea,
> Herbie Handcock, and Joe Zawinul, through the "Canterbury"
> English scene including Soft Machine, Alan Holdsworth and
> Bill Bruford to its decline as CD-101 Smooth Jazz with the
> likes of Kenny G. Somewhere in here Pat Metheny and John
> Scofield could somehow fit in.

>Jazz IV - Straight Ahead - All those guys who continue to mine the
> traditional territory of standards and the dense harmonic
> vocabulary of chord subs.

When Ken Burns was interviewed on Charlie Rose, he said that he allots the
last 25 years of jazz history only the last 40 minutes of his film because
not enough time has passed to really deal with this period as "history" --
it's still a story in the making. And I fully agree. Today we can look back
on the disparate threads of jazz history and see how they all tie to Louis
Armstrong; have a clear, removed perspective from which to compare Duke
Ellington and Count Basie; can view the enthusiasms and critiques of the
swing era with sufficient detachment not to be swept up into the political
and other factors that shaped them, etc. But jazz since 1975 is still too
close to be able to step back and see the big picture.