September 13 movie: Jazz, Episode 1. Netflix finally got the first episode of the Ken Burns jazz documentary. There was a lot of background to cover before they even got to the creation of jazz. Which seemed to encourage the tendency towards pomposity, especially from Wynton Marsalis. We found him in general really interesting when he was talking about the structure of music, acting out the styles of different musicians. And really annoying when he was pontificating about culture and so forth.
The introductory material meant that they spent less time talking about music in general and jazz in specific. Still, I learned a lot from this episode. The story I was most interested in, and found most tragic, was James Reese Europe. He was part of the transition from ragtime to jazz, led a military band during WWI, was a war hero, and was murdered right after the war. The movie made it sound like he would have changed the face of American music if he hadn't been killed so young. Europe also shows up in one of the other episodes we've seen. And I really want to learn more about him. The Durham library has one book about him -- non-circulating! How annoying. Amazon has one CD of his (actually 2 CDs of the exact same recordings, packaged differently) which I might buy.
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