Джаз: История американской музыки в документальном сериале Кена Бернса.

2000 documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns

Jazz is a 2001 television documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns. It was broadcast on PBS in 2001 and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. Its chronological and thematic episodes provided a history of jazz, emphasizing innovative composers and musicians and American history. Swing musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures. Several episodes discussed the later contributions of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to bebop, and of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane to free and cool jazz. Of this 10 part documentary surveying jazz in the years from 1917 to 2001, all but the last episode are devoted to music pre 1961. The series was produced by Florentine Films in cooperation with the BBC and in association with WETA TV, Washington.

Gene Santoro, writing in The Nation, notes, "If Burns had cut the final episode and billed this as Jazz: The First 50 Years, more of the discussion might be where it belongs—on the movie." William Berlind wrote in The Observer, "In allowing Mr. Marsalis to guide him, Mr. Burns has ultimately done us a disservice. He has managed to make a vital, evolving music seem dead and static." The British newspaper The Guardian wrote, "The series' principal totemic figures, quite rightly, are Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Since a large proportion of Jazz is devoted to the swing era, two white bandleaders, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, are also given prominence—as, later on, is Dave Brubeck. But even some critics who have spent their lives arguing for a proper recognition of jazz's African American essence believe that Burns—with the encouragement of Marsalis, Crouch and Murray—has pushed the Afrocentric line so far that the refusal to give credit to the contribution of white musicians undermines the series' historical accuracy." Professor emeritus Frank Tirro wrote, "He gives, as one example, Louis Armstrong's 'West End Blues' as 'a reflection of the country in the moments before the Great Depression.' I cannot see how he can support this statement. What is it reflecting? The African Americans in Harlem, the Wall Street entrepreneurs, or the white middle class farmers in Kansas and Iowa? This is bull session history."