Ken Burns Says "Jazz" 3 Billion Times (actually 2.97 bn) in Under 3.5 Minutes (Single of the year?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6zYwe3YCiI

fucking beautiful.

i might actually have to fill out a pazz & jop ballot now.

thank u

you are very welcome.

inspirational

It's brilliant and I love it, but I like my tv tributes to be a little more melodic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

Autotuned Carl Sagan kinda sounds like Kermit the Frog

That's amazing. Life the visual accompaniment too. I feel like a lot of people who went 90% of the way by clicking play will miss out by not sticking around for a minute!

true, yes

Number 1,845,397,002 shocked me!

Ken Burns Says 'Jazz' 2,970,000,000 Times In This Video. You Won't Believe Number 2,348,118,294!

Autotuned Carl Sagan kinda sounds like Kermit the Frog

always been thus

he is sitting in a room

incredibly lovely, really

i feel like it kinda works as critique but when i listened to it after thinking about that it went from lovely to incredibly unpleasant and oppressive

it is quite disturbing, yeah

Yeah this is pretty scary listening.

years ago I listened to Levar Burton read the audiobook adaptation of this series. In the ensuing time that has passed, the precise intonation and phrasing of Geordie La Forge saying "Funky Butt Hall" has never left my consciousness for any significant duration.

Hello thread

Is there a good thread to talk about Jazz? I'm watching it as I make my mixes and was kind of annoyed about how it started with ROOTS -> YOUNG LIFE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG (erm odjb, bit embarrassing, let's move on) -> HOW ABOUT MORE LOUIS ARMSTRONG? You get the impression that somehow nobody made any jazz records between 1917 and 1925.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, 18 September 2019 20:12 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wrote a load about ODJB and Livery Stable Blues over here. To sum up, it's not in any way soulful, but it's a brilliant record with revolutionary production from Charles E. Sooy. And yeah, Nick LaRocca was a racist prick, of course.

Almost by accident I saw the first episode again recently -- I enjoyed it more than I expected.

If Burns had ended the story in 1961, would the series hold up better now? The whole thing is the gospel according to Crouch and Marsalis, but I don't remember that point of view becoming obnoxious until the last episode.

Interesting question...the series is reasonably useful through the second-to-last episode, but if it ended there, it would leave out Mingus, among others, who isn't talked about until the final episode.

ilx's favorite era of jazz is the late 50s through the mid-70s, fwiw

Mingus doesn't quite fit the narrative, does he?

I can't remember how they deal with Sun Ra's long career ... surely not favorably

Ra is incredible and one of my favorites, but he's definitely an outlier. But Mingus played with everybody, was on the big jazz labels, was critically respected, he was a big deal.

Sun Ra wasn't even mentioned in passing (and, somewhat surprisingly, Ornette is given more time than Mingus is).

Given Ra's vast and deep influence across many areas of music and art, I don't know that "outlier" is accurate -- there's no Art Ensemble without Ra, and they got a couple of minutes.

The new music is often presented as "just a buncha weirdos at the margins, no need to pay them any mind." But when you look at contemporary issues of Down Beat -- say, 1960-67 or so -- the consensus is that the New Thing is indeed the new thing. The more mainstream critics obviously weren't fans, but they didn't dispute that it was the next major movement in the music. The prevailing attitude among critics seemed to be, "I know that this is the next big movement after bebop, but that doesn't mean I have to like it!"

Ra's hugely influential, yes. I meant "outlier" in the sense that he often seemed to be operating independently of the rest of the jazz world - he had his own circle of players, put out his own records, had his own way of doing things, was typically viewed as a bit crazy and as an outsider, no matter how much he leaned on his experience w/Fletcher Henderson to burnish his bona fides.

I feel like when he was really getting going in the 60s there was this mainstream jazz world - of labels, clubs, players, and critics - that he just wasn't a part of.

I dunno, I mean, John Gilmore had been in Blakey's Jazz Messengers; Pat Patrick recorded with James Moody and Jimmy Heath; and Julian Priester, Victor Sproles, and James Spaulding had been in the Arkestra. The "mainstream jazz world" in the '60s included John Coltrane's Quartet and Quintet, and Sonny Rollins' group with Don Cherry (to name just two off the top of my head), so there wasn't much of a divide between "mainstream jazz" and the new thing.

But granted, Ornette and Cecil were on Blue Note, Bill Dixon was on RCA, Ayler was on Impulse, and Ra didn't record for a major until the '70s (though he had recorded one album each for Delmark and Savoy in the '50s and '60s, respectively).

I knew about that Gilmore stint, the rest of those were news to me though!

my main gripe was the very chintzy coverage of bill evans.

and yeah: even coltrane's respect for gilmore is pretty well-documented.

#teamfuckwynton

my main gripe was the very chintzy coverage of bill evans.

I'm not a fan, but I agree, he should've gotten more coverage (though he was at least name-checked)...as should have Horace Silver and Bud Powell. I never understood the whole "welp, the series can't talk about everybody!" attitude. Not enough time? Make more episodes. Do a longer series. Problem solved.

not meaning this in a rude way at all, but in comparison to the other things and people covered, it doesn't matter if you're a fan of one of the three most influential jazz pianists to ever play the instrument. not saying he deserved an entire block or episode, but to shine him off the way they did was just insulting. it's just another fact that testifies for the series being a biased, purposely misleading mess.

Yeah, I was just pointing out that, while Evans was never my "bag," I do recognize that he was influential, and should've gotten more time. Whereas, if the producers of/consultants on the series weren't fans of an artist, they apparently refused to objectively consider that artist's importance and influence, so they gave them short shrift.

I'm with you on Evans being given more time, but for me personally, you might say that Everybody Digs Bill Evans But Tarfumes.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans But Tarfumes

lol