Who Tells the Story Matters: Authority and Bias in Ken Burns’ Jazz
I watched the Ken Burns Jazz documentary a few years ago, and it got me thinking about a bigger question: how Americans understand the history of jazz. The documentary is a prime example of how Western institutions shape that understanding. In many ways, Americans think about jazz the way they do because of narratives like this one.
Wynton Marsalis, the renowned jazz trumpeter and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, plays a central role in the film. I hear about him often – living in North Jersey near the George Washington Bridge, I often visit Lincoln Center, usually for the New York Philharmonic. Given his prominence in the New York music scene, it’s not surprising that Marsalis is such a polarizing figure. Critics often argue that his playing lacks passion, sticking too closely to tradition and focusing only on playing the “right” notes. This conservatism shows not only in his musicianship but also in his influence on the Jazz documentary.
Marsalis’s perspective is explicitly conservative. He’s all about the roots of jazz in New Orleans and swing, and he sees figures like Louis Armstrong as the perfect example of that tradition. He has also publicly critiqued later avant-garde or fusion jazz as less central to jazz’s “core” story, which helps explain why the documentary gives so much weight to the early players. With Marsalis front and center, that focus runs through the whole film, leaving less room for other voices and perspectives. His role as the main interpreter of jazz is a deliberate choice, and because there isn’t much counterbalance, the documentary ends up feeling like an echo chamber, with one authoritative voice shaping how viewers understand an entire art form. As a result, the film devotes much time to the early years of jazz and gives relatively little attention to developments after the 1960s, with figures like Armstrong dominating the narrative even though the story of jazz extends far beyond him.
Marsalis tends to look backward. He presents jazz as something from the past, something to preserve rather than evolve. While his dedication to tradition is respectable, portraying jazz this way makes it feel static and overly polished, overlooking the complexity and messiness of its history. Jazz wasn’t one city, one figure, or a single, neat story – it emerged from many places and countless musicians experimenting with blues, ragtime, and improvisation. It was vibrant, chaotic, and always changing. By emphasizing the past over evolution, Marsalis promotes an imagined past and a narrow definition of jazz, one that risks turning a living, breathing art form into a historical artifact. Yet music evolves, and jazz has never been an exception.
Of course, defining jazz in a documentary is necessary, since you can’t tell every story at once. Presenting a refined, traditional form makes sense for a general audience and helps preserve the term “jazz” from dilution. Still, with such a large platform comes the responsibility to be balanced and transparent about perspective. Reducing jazz to a historical artifact, as Burns and Marsalis do, misses the full story of its ongoing evolution and the many voices that shaped it.
This brings us to the larger point: who tells the story matters. In this case, the narrative was primarily shaped by Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis, whose personal viewpoints guided the focus of the film. The documentary ultimately reflects not only jazz history, but also the biases of those entrusted to define it.
