Ken Burns’s America Reconsidered: Mainstreaming Jazz (2001) for a National Audience

Abstract

More than half a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald hardly imagined the many comebacks that television would allow by its steady stream of reruns, revivals, and return engagements when he wrote his now-classic line, “there are no second acts in American lives.”² TV is full of second acts and more; it even provides succeeding generations with ready access to the once famous but now forgotten who somehow take on a fresh new relevance with the passage of time. Geoff Ward, for one, never lost his lifelong interest in jazz, including his fascination with the music’s many innovative composers and performers. He brought his small but burgeoning record collection with him at 14 when his family left Chicago to live in India during his high school years: “[O]n some level jazz music kept me rooted at home.”³ When he journeyed again at 16 to briefly attend school in France, he developed a deep attachment for Louis Armstrong and remembers playing “West End Blues” “a thousand times over that summer.”⁴

Jazz is art, not sociology. It is primarily an African American creation but it belongs to all of us, and the chance to bring it alive for a national audience in serious need of being reminded of the astonishing feats Americans can perform when not held back by prejudice and parochialism, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for which I shall always be grateful.

—Geoffrey C. Ward, 1996¹