It s an art form that can give us a painless way of understanding ourselves. Jazz, the drummer Art Blakey liked to say, washes away the dust of everyday life. JAZZ is much more than a study of this extraordinary American music, Ken Burns said.
Jazz offers a precise prism through which so much of American history can be seen.
Embedded in the music, in its riveting biographies and soaring artistic achievement, can be found our oft-neglected conscience, a message of hope and transcendence, of affirmation in the face of adversity, unequaled in the unfolding drama and parade we call American history. While Burns explores these stories, he also celebrates the music, taking it from the background to the foreground. Making JAZZ was like going from three dimensions involving narration, footage and interviews to four because of the primacy of the music, the filmmaker said. The narrative style that we adopted for JAZZ is in many ways dictated by the music. It was incumbent upon us to have the sound up-front, for the images and narration to accent the music rather than the other way around.