|
Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
In 2001 the nation paid more attention to jazz than it had for a long time. With its first aired episode on 8 January, Jazz, a film by Ken Burns, (1) continued the filmmaker's string of epic documentaries on American life. The project stands as Burns's most ambitious. (2) The film's ten episodes (nineteen hours of film) were broadcast on the PBS network over four weeks, with an estimated thirteen million viewers on the first day alone. (3) Since then, the film has been distributed in both VHS and DVD formats, along with a companion book coauthored with Geoffrey C. Ward (4) (henceforth, the Ward book), and several compact disc sets, including a five-disc set culled from the series, a "best of" compact disc, and twenty-two disc-length anthologies of featured performers.
A coordinated onslaught of Jazz images, sounds, and products, as well as the enormous marketing effort accompanying them, did more than just purvey a set of products that year: it fostered Jazz (and jazz) as a topic of national discussion--in print, on television, at the dinner table, and on the Internet. In this study I examine Burns's penetration into the national consciousness, and how his version of jazz history is received and critically evaluated.
Reception studies generally do not include the Internet as a site of criticism. Along with more traditional reception media, I pointedly include the World Wide Web's role in several types of reception that I call "official," "quasi-official," "submerged official," and "indie." The Internet has changed an important aspect of the critical apparatus. The exchange of information and opinion is dramatically speeded through this easily shared medium. The resulting ease of communication tends to momentarily blur critical hierarchies, increasing the exchange between expert and aficionado. Reception studies can benefit from this opportunity for an enriched perspective. The Jazz project is a case in point: this widely dispersed critical pool raises a cluster of objections to Burns's version of jazz history.
JAZZ AND ITS IMPORTANCE
Judging by the marketing effort that supported it, it is not surprising that Jazz was no ordinary miniseries, but rather a cultural event. A few provocative news items illustrate the effort and its rewards. First, the film trade publication Hollywood Reporter announced in November 2000 that Amazon.com had created a partnership with Burns to launch an online store with a catalog of thirty-five thousand items related to Jazz. (5) Second, a USA Today article in January 2001 announced that halfway through the showing of the ten-episode series, sales of related merchandise had already topped fifteen million dollars. (6) (Contextualizing this point, Carolyn Kleiner estimates total domestic jazz album sales in 1999 were roughly twenty million dollars. (7)) Third, nine months after the series aired, two of the anthology albums from the Burns collection were still on Barnes & Noble's Top Fifty Jazz List. (8) Fourth, elsewhere on the same Web site, interest showed up in the print version of Jazz, too. On that same date the Ward hardcover book was still the second-best-selling jazz book title for Barnes & Noble--the soft cover was fourth. While sales figures for the Burns-marketed albums are not public, the fact that nine months after the film's initial broadcast two of them remained on the Top Fifty list highlights the staying power of the Jazz package in the jazz market.
The popularity of the Burns project may have been predictable, given the large-scale marketing effort behind it as well as a core of related factors: (1) Burns's established reputation for well-produced, engaging historical documentaries; (2) the nationalistic portrayal of jazz as uniquely American, as America's Classical Music; and (3) Burns's portrayal of jazz as sophisticated African American music, a music conspicuously successful as art despite its race-torn surroundings.
Burns also demonstrated his ability to create demand, not only for the sights and sounds of jazz but also for mugs, T-shirts, cars, and other jazzy merchandise. Articles in the PBS 2001 Annual Report (9) and Advertising Age (10) report, among other efforts, the commitment of three thousand Starbucks stores to play selections from the compilation compact discs through the month of January. The articles also describe the distribution of press materials, study guides, and the Ward book to six million middle-school students, paid for by General Motors, a major contributor to the project. (11) The strategy paid dividends in media buzz: virtually every major newspaper, family magazine, magazine, and radio and television network in America displayed feature articles on the series in the days and weeks leading up to its broadcast. Overtly in the form of paid print and broadcast advertising and free in the form of interviews and reportage generated with the aid of publicists' skills, a huge investment in publicity assured the Burns project's success. Thanks largely to these efforts, Jazz and jazz music were on everyone's radar screen, at least in the winter of 2001.
Of course, reception as viewership, sales, or media buzz does not necessarily imply deep or lasting impact on our understanding of jazz. But the impact of Jazz in that pivotal year intensified, by way of an interesting one-two punch. First, the promoters of the Burns project also focused on building a strong Jazz presence in college survey classes; second, at virtually the same moment as the series broadcast, the Smithsonian Institution pulled from its catalog the multi-compact disc anthology, Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. (12)
Consider the effect of decades of agitating for jazz in college curricula by, among others, Down Beat magazine and the International Association of Jazz Educators. (13) Not only are over a hundred postsecondary schools now offering courses on jazz, but the courses are heavily enrolled, often more so than other, more traditional music classes. (14) These jazz courses generally are situated in schools of music, which have a primary mandate to develop "chops" rather than ground the student in cultural or historical knowledge. (15) The College Music Society's Weekly Electronic Music Vacancy List for 5 October 2001, for example, includes thirteen academic job openings that mention jazz. (16) All but five are strictly applied or conductor positions, and of those, four specify jazz theory or jazz as merely a secondary interest. This means that a film series like Burns's might be attractive as a shorthand historical introduction for those schools that do not yet provide a jazz history course.
Even for those teachers who do offer history surveys and whose primary interest is jazz history, the time to change texts, and therefore course content, is likely close at hand. Nearly every college text on jazz written in the past quarter century has centered its listening examples on the Smithsonian Collection. (17)
On a related educational front, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of the Ward book, donated one thousand copies to the United Negro College Fund and its member schools. (18) The availability of these materials in college classrooms, as well as the complementary offerings from the Burns collection, could not have been timed more fortuitously. With the Smithsonian Collection's disappearance, the Burns collection is in a position to become the heir-apparent in the jazz canonizing business, possibly, as with the Smithsonian Collection, for as long as a generation. Further, if listening trends continue, these college students will likely take their place as part of the core jazz audience, a position they tend to retain as they grow older. (19)
What I have described so fat; of course, is reception mediated by marketing, and therefore it is an engineered reception. The idea is to take a product and create a need, or expand an existing need. In this case, the product is both jazz (the music) and Jazz (the film and its many subsidiary offerings). Sales have been brisk. The book and compact discs, released in time for Christmas, quickly became the sales focus of Tower Records, Barnes & Noble, and other sales outposts. The full accounting has not been released, but has been described as "staggering." This kind of reception brings tears to a marketing executive's eyes.
But this "reception" can also be dismissed as spin-doctoring. The proof of Jazz's impact lies in how the project has been received and evaluated during and after the film's broadcast, and how deeply this impression has penetrated.
RECEPTION STUDIES GENERALLY
Reception Media
Because dialogue about the project has been pervasive, the potential impact of Jazz to become the dominant narrative of jazz history is long-term and profound. I say "potential" because, despite sales figures, response to the project has been anything but uniform. The hotly contested reception of Jazz reflects the latest skirmish in the long battle over the identity of jazz. In past years, this conflict has played out in reviews, op-ed articles in news and industry journals, and in scholarly writing. In addition to the traditional print and broadcast media for these discourses--newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, radio, and television--the Internet is becoming an increasingly important site for opinion-mongering. This represents a change, not only in where opinions are traded, but also in the impact of the exchanges themselves. The change has occurred because the Web's structure promotes access that is inexpensive, relatively egalitarian, and immediate. The Internet provides new sites for reception, sites significant for their proliferation and their resistance to master narratives. Opinions promulgated in the official media, whether they have attached themselves to the Web or not, are less likely to be swinging the heavy bats they have in the past. With the Internet, the official voices are becoming only part of a democratized, cacophonous crowd of claimants to the truth.
What Normally Counts as Reception?
Reception studies in music typically pay close attention to periodical reviews and monographs and (less often) publicity, feature articles, and advertising. (20) Academic journal reviews and monographs, as well as reviews and articles in "name" newspapers, periodicals, and industry magazines, operate as what I call official reception, that is, they are for the most part adjudicated, or at least edited, and are published in scholarly journals or periodicals that traffic in "objective," informed reportage and evaluation. Examples of academic reception show up in American Music, Popular Music and Society, and Jazz Research. Examples of the journalistic kind can be found in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, and--targeted specifically to a jazz readership--Jazz Times, Jazzis, and Down Beat.
In comparison to the sphere of jazz writing, other areas of critical inquiry operate within a comfortable hierarchy: a review article by a renowned scholar of nineteenth-century music tends to carry more weight than a review by a critical journalist, even a respected one. In jazz, such a hierarchy cannot be assumed. Often journalistic writers will cite academic writers to buttress their arguments, but citations are just as likely to flow the other way. Distinctions between town and gown are blurred in more ways than one: journalistic writers also contribute to the wealth of books on jazz published every year: Although their books are rarely published by university presses, they are regularly cited in university-published academic writing.
Further, the academic and journalistic spheres of official criticism are somewhat permeable, a fact that is illustrated in the authorship of anthology and reissue album liner notes. Retrospective reissues, whether collected as anthologies or reissued as historically important albums, routinely contain liner notes recalling the creation of the music and assessing its historical importance. Producers or other industry figures write many of these notes (Columbia Records' Michael Cuscuna and Fantasy's Orrin Keepnews come to mind), but so also do journalists (Chris Albertson, Bill Milkowski) and academics (Lewis Porter, Scott DeVeaux, Gunther Schuller). Further, journalists can themselves be academics. Dan Morgenstern, formerly editor of Down Beat and current director of the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, exemplifies this. (21)
What is missing from this hierarchy, and what calls its plausibility into question, is the jazz musician. Musicians complain, often publicly, (22) that jazz criticism is made up of a caste of Brahmins whose credentials do not include making music of their own--a charge rarely leveled at the scholar or journalist of nineteenth-century music. The result is that neither journalists nor academics carry an automatically high "believability quotient."...
|
