Ken Burns: Student of History—or Left-Wing Gasbag?
http://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
In “How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz,” critic Jeffrey St. Clair writes, “Burns doesn’t really like music. In the 19 hours of film, he never lets one song play to completion, anywhere near completion. Yet there is a constant chatter riding on top of the music…In a film supposedly about music, the music itself has been relegated to the background.”
Burns’ “Jazz,” contains a host of shortcomings, including further demonstration of Burns’ apparent lack of affinity for Hispanics with his complete omission of Latin Jazz from the 19-hour film, over-reliance on Louis Armstrong, dismissal of jazz after 1960 and the slighting of Bill Evans, Miles Davis’ influential pianist, possibly due to Burns’ narrator Stanley Crouch’s long history of animosity toward Davis.
Alex W. Rodriguez writes, “Ken Burns’ Jazz ultimately does a disservice to the jazz community because it presents such an inaccurate, flawed, rigid, politically biased framework.”
Ken Burns’ reputation is that of a PBS documentary creator, but as his works show, he is actually a significant cog in the left-wing propaganda machine. His partisan agenda is only matched by his carelessness with the facts.