Is it really possible, as I read in the New York Times review, that the last *40* years of jazz will be compressed into one single episode of the Ken Burns series?! This doesn't just leave out the "loungy and hip jazz of the 50s and 60s." It leaves out: post-bop, Albert Ayler, MJQ, the Art Ensemble, the later Art Blakey & Jazz Messengers, all of Miles post-Kind of Blue, "fusion" and "fuzak", the entire mid-70s east coast scene from which later sprang go go (via Chuck Brown) and trip hop (via Donald Byrd and so on), Weather Report, Wes Montgomery, Herbie Hancock, the third generation big bands (Akiyoshi-Tabackin especially), Branford Marsalis, Abdullah Ibrahim, Pat Metheny, the later Trane (and Alice Coltrane too), the "free jazz" movement, the jazz/electronic experiments (up to and including Carl Craig's and last spring's Transmat Time/Space band), Pharaoh Sanders, and so much more. And I didn't even mention Latin jazz, which has had so much history and development since the late 1950s -- I saw Pete Escovedo's big band play an outdoor gig in San Francisco last summer that just blew my sox off.
And all that since 1960. But Burns is ever the classicist as a historian and TV producer, so there you have it. The post-1960 history is messy, convoluted, doesn't flow in a single linear direction, doesn't have deep and common themes and thus is "post-modern" and difficult to cover coherently in a mass-audience presentation like the current series... I'm not a huge jazz fan, really, but I have major respect for the fact that it continues to live and evolve, not in the retrospective sense that, say, punk and bluegrass do (to name two very different musical genres that have some interesting parallels developmentally), but in the truly evolutionary sense. phred
