Annotations for Subject: Jazz

And a commentary on jazz, this and more, coming up on this edition of Latino USA.

In his documentary series Jazz, Ken Burns looks into the history of the music as a way to look into the history of the country, especially the issue of race. It is a great idea, but in Jazz, Burns has construed the art form and the society that created it almost completely in terms of black and white.

Commentator Fernando Gonzalez has some thoughts on the 10-part, 19- hour PBS documentary, which has been running on most public television stations.

In the United States of Jazz, Latin music and musicians, or more to the point, Latinos and their culture in general, barely merit a footnote. This view obviously reflects the biases and cultural limitations of Burns and his advisors, but their perspective, however, is one widely shared. In its obsession with race, the United States is stuck on the idea of an imaginary country, populated only by descendants of white Europeans and their former slaves. Nobody else counts. This is an astounding notion, especially given that, with more than 30 million Latinos living within its borders, the United States is actually the fifth largest Latin American country. This is a country within a country. In fact, racial issues between blacks and Latinos, and the balance of political and economic power both between those two groups and in relation with the white majority, will help define life here for this century and beyond. And yet, in the United States, Burns explores in Jazz, Latinos are simply not relevant to the story. Not then, not now.

Back in the late 1930s, the great Jerry Roll Morton said, quote, "If you can't manage to put pages in Spanish in your tunes, you'll never get the right seasoning for jazz." But in Burns' Jazz, there is no mention of historic Latin Jazz figures such as saxophonist and bandleader Mario Bauza, timbalero Tito Puente, or arranger and composer Arturo Chico O'Farrill. And when he looks to the future, Burns does not see fit to mention young artists such as Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez or Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sanchez.

These are not small-time Latin Jazz players working obscurely in some stylistic ghetto, but superior musicians who happen to be Latinos, and who, for the past decade, have been developing a pan-Latin view of Jazz that might very well be the music's future. Early on in Jazz, trumpetist Wynton Marsalis, who was also a crucial advisor to the series, speaks about how, quote, "the real power of jazz is that a group of people can come together and negotiate their agendas with each other." That in Jazz is a prime example of such negotiation. Here is a music drawn from several cultures and traditions, played by groups made up of musicians with often profoundly different backgrounds, and more. Here is a music with all deep roots, embracing the new world. A music rich with memories, but looking for a future unburdened by history. A music street-wise and brash, but also touchingly familiar with the past. Here is a music with all deep roots, embracing the new world. It is a soundtrack for a nation of immigrants. But you won't hear any of it in Jazz, and that's too bad. By perpetuating the notion of a United States and an American culture drawn only from two races, Jazz doesn't just fail Latinos or Latin music fans. It fails us all.