For all that advocacy, it's possible to watch Jazz and not get the essence of jazz. The humor and the minor characters. The joy and the urgency. The music made by and for urban night-crawlers who dressed swank and talked blue streaks of hipster jive. The loner genius with back to the crowd, the misunderstood drunk, the anonymous sideman who, in eight bars of solo spotlight, would spill the kind of personal secrets he'd never divulge in years of conversation.
Jazz matters, still.
But not for the reasons Burns and his advisory board think. Jazz matters because it remains the most vivid illustration of that quintessential American trait, the improvisatory impulse. It is music of supreme resourcefulness, the sound of humans using anything at hand to transform their circumstances. It grows out of an impulse to reshape the moment, rearrange the furniture, subvert the status quo. The greater significance of jazz eludes language, yet comes through in the clips of folks like Armstrong, whose heart radiated mightily, and Thelonious Monk, whose innovations defied conventional description.