Jazz

Jazz, the much-heralded ten-part PBS video series, is an American historical event in itself. The broadcast programs and their ancillary documents—a boxed set of ten videocassettes, a book, a boxed five-CD set of music, a single CD personally selected by Burns, twenty-two jazz albums devoted to individual artists featured in the documentary, and more—is the most publicized and widely promoted presentation this music has received in its hundredyear history. The magnitude, scope, and allembracing exploitation of musical, visual, and verbal elements might favorably be compared to Richard Wagner's vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk that, for him, resulted in a four-opera Ring Cycle, a theater specially built for the production at Bayreuth, disciples, detractors, enormous expense, and long-lasting consequences. Although we await the consequences, and regardless of criticism pro and con, Ken Burns's Jazz is a significant undertaking of great magnitude and serious purpose that will be remembered as an influential

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