On Sunday evenings late last year, ABC television’s ratings jumped as viewers across the nation tuned in to Love is in the Air, a documentary series on Australian popular music in the late 20th century. If these viewers had watched the same network a few hours earlier, they would have seen a re-screening of Jazz, another musical documentary series, which showed American popular music over the early and mid 20th century. The former show was an ABC production, while the latter came from the United States—and what a contrast they presented.
The focus in Jazz, which was the work of the American film maker Ken Burns, was upon artistic endeavour. A typical slice of the narrative started by telling you about a dishevelled young man who slouched into a smoky club on 52nd Street. He looked a mess, with odd shoes on, his hair messed up, wearing a rumpled jacket, and he pulled out of a shabby paper bag a saxophone held together with rubber bands. He stepped over to the small group that had just set up and had a word with the drummer. They started up a riff, and next thing the sax player was playing, not the melody, but the base line, putting notes in there that no one had ever thought of before, and they sounded discordant but they worked, and there was this weird spacing in the passage. Next thing the trumpeter was jamming with him, using this rapid fingering; and a small but significant revolution had just occurred in Western music. The guy on sax was Charlie Parker and the hornblower in heavy glasses was Dizzy Gillespie. Together, they had just made one of those paradigm shifts that—according to musicologists—only a Beethoven can come up with. And even if you didn’t fully agree, you had to admit that music had changed.
Jazz was about artistry and expression, exploring how music is food for the soul, even how music can convey our individual, and sometimes collective humanity. Nestled in front of the box, they laid it out for you. The music played, and your appreciation deepened; and it didn’t matter if you were unfamiliar with Bix Beiderbecke or Duke Ellington or Theolonious Monk, of if you couldn’t before tell ‘West End Blues’ from ‘St Thomas’ or ‘Take the “A” Train’, because Jazz spoke to all viewers on their level, lifting them up and getting them to enjoy