American jazz has never had a boost quite like it. When filmmaker Ken Burns's 10-part series Jazz: A History of America's Music was screened on the public broadcasting network in January, it signalled the beginning of a slick marketing operation to rival Batman and Star Wars. Within days, the New York Times reported the book tie-in had sold out its initial shipment of 200,000. Compilation albums of top jazz stars released under Burns's name took up 16 spots on Billboard magazine's Top Jazz Album chart - headed by the five-CD companion box set Jazz: The History of America's Music, a rare joint venture between record giants Verve and Columbia/Legacy.
By March, the set had been certified platinum. Across America, the cafΘ chain Starbuck's piped jazz into their coffee houses, adorned with Jazz posters; the National Basketball Association celebrated Jazz on their network and cable television slots; while videos and DVDs of the programme were selling like hot cakes.
Jazz had its high-water mark in the 1930s and 1940s. Its popularity fell away at the first stirrings of Beatlemania and the rise of rock, but it has suddenly been thrust back into American consciousness. On the tails of the television series, Louis Armstrong posthumously cracked the Billboard Country Music Chart at number 139. "The response has been a hundred times more than I expected," says Burns, speaking down the line from Florentine Films, his production company in New Hampshire. "More than 60 million people saw some or all of the series, and more people are now going to jazz clubs. I've got the best reviews in my life - it's hard to argue when someone says 'This is the greatest documentary ever made'. And the Washington Post and the New York Times and Time magazine and literally thousands of other reviews have borne this out."
Buoyed by statistics that suggest that the 10-part series is the best thing to have happened in American jazz in decades, he deflects any criticism - and in America the documentary has not been short of critics - with the calm assurance of a politician on message. Indeed, to music business insiders, Burns has no case to answer. Michael Kauffman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Verve, points out, "The traditional jazz market has seen at least $1 million more in sales since the series began. Jazz sales in the US last fall were roughly a little over 2 per cent of sales.
"Since the series, we've seen the sales go up to just over 4 per cent. While that might not seem like much of an increase, for the jazz world it's huge."
Due to be aired on the BBC from tonight, Jazz is the third part of Burns's trilogy on American life that began in 1990 with The Civil War, and followed in 1996 with Baseball. Six years in the making, it was surprising to hear the filmmaker owned less than half a dozen jazz albums at the outset of the project. "I grew up with a father who played Ellington and all varieties of jazz," he rationalises. "I worked in a record store in all of my high school years selling jazz and listening to it and enjoying it. It was just being born in 1953; I was a child of R& and rock 'n' roll."
So he jumped into the jazz pond as an initiate. "It was something I came to with a bit of foreknowledge," he continues, "but it was a wonderful process of discovery." Burns lovingly pans the early years of jazz history so that it takes until episode six of a 10-part series to move from the turn of the 20th century to 1939 (the BBC has broken the series into more episodes, albeit shorter than those shown in America), so it comes as a shock when the final episode crams together the deaths of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington plus the whole history of jazz from 1961 to the present day - that's almost half the lifetime of the music.
This, for many American critics, represents the most controversial aspect of the series - one particularly bemused commentator observed "It's like Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a laborious trek through an underpopulated, hardly recognisable world where in the final section everything is suddenly and mercilessly sped up."
Burns defends his failure to deal with contemporary jazz by saying, "Tell me, who are today's players that are the equal of an Armstrong, and Ellington, a Parker, a Coltrane?" Which of course is little bit disingenuous. It's as if he has conflated the arts with his previous documentary on baseball, where such matters are resolved with a scorecard. Is CΘzanne the "equal" of Raphael, Beethoven the "equal" of Mozart?
Even so, it's strange he should ignore major contemporary musicians such as the late Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Henry Threadgill and a host of others.
Burns does not see it that way, of course. "I would hold up the last 40 minutes of my film, which celebrates the diversity and variety of jazz in the last 25 years, as a piece of film-making that is unequalled by anything else I have ever done," he asserts. Others might have a different opinion, particularly since he chooses to portray the main contemporary development after 1961 as trumpet star Wynton Marsalis's arrival to breathe new life into jazz and save it from the sirens of fusion and freedom. And here lies the nub of a far deeper problem that runs through Jazz, something that American critics, in that most politically correct of lands, have in the main skirted around.
In emphasising the earlier years of jazz in his series, Burns closely echoes the themes expressed by writer, novelist and cultural historian Albert Murray, whose non-fiction books - The Omni Americans, The Hero and the Blues and Stomping the Blues - have become enormously influential in some jazz circles. In so doing, he places the series at the centre of an intense debate over defining exactly what jazz is.
In many ways, Murray's Stomping the Blues, first published in 1976, sets the agenda for this debate. It defines jazz in terms of past verities - a blues sensibility (a metaphor for black) and swing both central tenants in deciding what jazz is - and restores its primal relationship to dance - a feature of jazz during the 1920s, 1930s and into the 1940s. (As an aside, Burns devotes a whole episode to jazz dance.) Murray also asserts in the book that white musicians "are not native to the idiom" of jazz.
It is here the plot thickens. Murray is a member of the series'board of advisers, as is writer Stanley Crouch, who is a Murray "disciple". According to Burns's book of the series, trumpeter Marsalis, the most high-profile jazz musician of recent times, soaked up all the jazz history he could "with help from Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch". Marsalis is the senior creative consultant and main talking head throughout the series.
As the American critic Francis Davis observed recently in Atlantic Monthly, "What we are getting in Jazz is the party line." On the one hand, Murray and company's ambitions are highly laudable: to establish jazz as an art form with its own - to use Pierre Bourdieu's phrase - "cultural capital" of an artistic tradition. But on the other, in establishing jazz as having a long period of evolution analogous to Western art, they set out to cleanse jazz history of its European (white) connections.
There is a pleasing irony in this triumphant reversal - the music of a slaved minority becoming "America's classical music", with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington touring the world as cultural ambassadors for the American state department in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, the traditional reading of jazz history - that jazz emerged through the tensions between Africa (rhythm) and Europe (harmony) with melody (the blues) somewhere in between - emphasises jazz's debt to Africa.
The historical continuum of Armstrong and Ellington, which Jazz pursues at the expense of many important contributors to the art, presents exemplars of a black musical tradition that identifies with jazz's Golden Age, ambiguously located somewhere between the late 1920s and late 1940s. This is the period of jazz most strongly identified with Afro-American culture.
When the continuum breaks down in the 1950s, as jazz begins to fragment into a number of sub-cultures - "Cool" or West Coast Jazz, Third Stream (jazz and classical music), hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, jazz-rock and so on - defining "the real jazz" becomes a powerful weapon. The way Murray achieves this is through exclusion, denying contemporary developments in the narrative of jazz history.
The story picks up again in the 1980s with the emergence of Marsalis. To put it another way, if the word jazz means anything, then some central essence of its definition must remain constant throughout its development from its pre-history until today. Marsalis renews that link in the present.
As Burns confirms, Marsalis told him during the making of the film that "jazz is about the negotiation of agendas". Burns seems to have bought Murray's agenda more or less intact, since Jazz is not entirely about, well, jazz.
"Jazz is about sex and the way men and women talk to each other; it's about drug abuse and cities, but it's mainly about race," Burns says. When asked if he adopted a revisionist stance with Jazz, Burns is quick to reject such claims; but, interestingly, he does so in the very terms Murray uses when he defines jazz. "It's hardly revisionism to suggest the elements that might unite jazz are a genius for improvisation, a willingness to subscribe to the blues and an aspect of swing," he says.
No one would disagree with the central assertion that jazz began as a wonderful Afro-American phenomenon, and that all the great innovations were prompted by black initiative. It's just that Murray and co, and, tacitly, Burns, seem to go that extra mile by implying only Afro-Americans can play "the real jazz" - a view that ignores jazz's actual history and does the music a disservice by asserting it has not grown beyond its roots. The joy of jazz, surely, is that it is a truly democratic music that saw black and white musicians sharing the same bandstand in the troubled racial climate from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Burns is now at work on a film biography of Mark Twain, and Jazz is but another highly successful addition to an impressive curriculum vitae that, in addition to The Civil War and Baseball, includes the Academy Award nominees Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty, and documentaries such as The Congress, Thomas Hart Benton and Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which won a Peabody award last year.
As Jazz becomes a distant memory for Burns, the reverberations he has created are likely to be felt for years to come, as the battle rages for jazz's heart and soul. By portraying jazz as a museum with the "real" jazz played by custodians of its Golden Years, Burns's Jazz is fatally flawed because it fails to acknowledge contemporary jazz musicians who, in reaching into the future, are making jazz relevant to the new millennium - just like Armstrong and Ellington did for the music in the 20th century.
Ken Burns's series Jazz begins tonight on BBC2 at 7.30 p.m. and continues on Monday at 11.20pm. A profile, America, America - The Films of Ken Burns, will be shown at 7 p.m.