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 Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Louis Armstrong An Illustrated History 
Jazz: A History of America's Music
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The jazz-instrumentalist-as-singer comes to life on Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul" and Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers' "Doodlin'." Clifford Brown and Max Roach's "I Get a Kick out of You" epitomizes the hard-bop era, while Miles Davis's "So What" stands as the modal masterpiece. The cool school is in session with Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan dishing out "Walkin' Shoes," and the Modern Jazz Quartet's soulful elegy "Django" straddles all the above musical orbits. As for Django Reinhardt, he's featured on "Shine" with the justly famed Le Quartet du Hot Club de France.
Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" and "Potato Head Blues" and Duke Ellington's rousing rendition of Billy Strayhorn's anthem, "Take the A Train," and his moody "Solitude" show why they are the Olympian masters of this art form--and the most frequently featured artists in the series. Although Ken Burns tries bringing the music up-to-date with Wynton Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, and two jazz-hip-hop-influenced tracks--Herbie Hancock's robotic "Rockit" and the French-language "Un Aige en Danger" by MC Solaar and bass legend Ron Carter--there are significant holes here. After Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, the avant-garde period from the late 1960s to the 1980s is lacking. And aside from the bossa nova hit "Desafinado," Latin jazz is also missing. It's a tough task summarizing jazz in five CDs, and Burns has given us a vibrant and vivid multicolored aural portrait of the music. --Eugene Holley Jr. - Amazon.com
Ken Burns JAZZ:
This five-CD box set soundtrack to filmmaker Ken Burns's 10-part, 19-hour documentary Jazz spans nearly a century of jazz styles, from the martial rhythms of James Reese Europe to the soul-jazz of Grover Washington Jr. It includes time-tested classics like Benny Goodman's 1938 classic, "Sing, Sing, Sing"; John Coltrane's chanting 1965 immortal track, "A Love Supreme"; Billie Holiday's blue-ember ballad, "God Bless the Child"; and Ella Fitzgerald peeling off "A Tisket A-Tasket." Bebop is represented by Charlie Parker's orchestral bop version of "Just Friends"; Thelonious Monk's nocturnal calling card, "'Round Midnight"; and Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" and "Groovin' High."
The Story of America's Music
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Even that, however, may pale beside "So What" from 1959's Kind of Blue session. With a band that included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley and pianist Bill Evans, Davis was both creating the modal school of improvisation and recording its most enduring works. A decade later, Davis took another epoch-defining step, layering electric keyboards and percussion for "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" from the Bitches Brew sessions. There are other exalted performances here, like the live version of "My Funny Valentine," one of his most enduring ballads, and a host of stellar sideman performances by such influential stylists as Gerry Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams. --Stuart Broomer
- Amazon.com
Ken Burns JAZZ Collection:
Duke Ellington
One of the toughest jobs in assembling the Jazz artist compilations must have been picking the 21 tracks featured on the Duke Ellington disc. Ellington composed thousands of songs and had a career that spanned six decades. More than a jazz great, Ellington is simply one of the most important musical figures in the 20th century. Surprisingly, all the material here was recorded on or before 1960, which eliminates great later works like the Far East Suite and the sacred concerts. Also missing is the legendary 1956 Newport Jazz Festival performance of "Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue," which was the flashpoint that revitalized a career that had fallen on commercial hard times with the emergence of bebop. Not surprisingly, there are four tracks from the so-called Blanton-Webster era, which was a happy convergence of personnel and Ellington's own muse that led the Ellington band to unsurpassed heights. A bit flawed, this is the briefest of glimpses at a musical galaxy that goes on forever. --Tad Hendrickson - Amazon.com
First emerging in Charlie Parker's quintet and the hothouse of bop in the late 1940s, Miles Davis soon became the dominant trendsetter in modern jazz, creating new settings for his spare, lyrical trumpet in the cool, hard bop, modal, and fusion movements. This career-spanning collection (an accompaniment to Ken Burns's 10-part documentary, Jazz), then, contains not only Davis's landmarks, but also some of modern jazz history's mileposts. The 1949 Birth of the Cool nonet
sessions, represented here by "Boplicity," heralded the cool school with its airy, transparent textures. The tougher, hard-swinging "Walkin'" from 1954 is an extended masterpiece of hard bop with a trumpet solo that shows Davis's command of construction, while the beautiful "I Loves You, Porgy" illustrates Davis's collaboration with arranger Gil Evans, the most influential partnership between soloist and orchestrator in modern jazz.
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