[Dixielandjazz] PBS - Legends of Jazz starts this month

[Steve barbone]

Whether this PBS show is OKOM or not is immaterial because it is a milestone
in bringing "JAZZ" to the TV audience. And that can't hurt.

Cheers,
Steve


TV Review | 'Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis'
'Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis' Lets Musicians Do the Talking

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - April 4, 2006

The publicity for "Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis," a new 13-part series
of half-hour shows on public television, boasts that it is the first regular
network jazz series of its kind in more than 40 years. That means a
perform-a-song and talk-to-the-host kind of show, as opposed to a Ken
Burns-like exposition of history. It refers specifically to "Jazz Scene,
U.S.A.," a program produced by Steve Allen and broadcast in 1962.

The pianist Ramsey Lewis is the host of "Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,"
a new performance and interview series on PBS.

"Legends of Jazz" could have learned from the visual effectiveness of that
show, or from good recent examples of studio-filmed jazz like the film
"Calle 54." Instead, it wastes a great opportunity with a rictus grin: it is
cheerily glib, aggressively middle-of-the-road, deferential toward the past
yet purposefully vague enough to be nearly ahistorical, as if this were a
quality to be desired.

The host is the pianist Ramsey Lewis, and the format remains the same in
each episode: each guest plays a song, the guests play together, and then
Mr. Lewis joins them on a version of the show's theme. Whatever spontaneity
may have been in the filmed conversations has been largely excised: the
interviews are twitchy with edits. His questions, along the lines of "What
made you want to pick up the trumpet?," are doggedly polite, basic and
weirdly resistant to subtlety and insight.

The guitar episode features Jim Hall with Pat Metheny, and it's probably the
series at its best. The idea, generally, is to pair an older master with a
younger figure. (Mr. Hall is 75, Mr. Metheny 51.) The mild-looking Mr. Hall
is brave enough to utter actual thoughts: first he claims to harbor no
nostalgia for the past, then he casually mentions that Ben Webster taught
him how to breathe through the guitar like a saxophonist. And bang! comes
the edit. (Jazz is so cerebral, you know. It scares people.) But both
musicians' performances are worth watching. There's a sense of digging in,
and Mr. Metheny brings his regular trio, with the bassist Christian McBride
and the drummer Antonio Sanchez.

"The Golden Horns," the trumpet episode that opens the series, represents
the show at its worst. The lineage here is Clark Terry, Roy Hargrove and
Chris Botti. Clark Terry is one of the best improvising musicians alive; he
comes from the generation that grew up in big bands, and he possesses all
the secrets about sound and tone and rhythm in jazz, not to mention
balancing art and commerce. Mr. Hargrove came along almost 50 years later,
in the early 1990's, dealing with post-bop and funk and Cuban music; he has
a commitment to maintaining working bands and encouraging younger players.

On the other hand, Mr. Botti, a former sideman for Paul Simon and Sting and
a trumpet player of middling talent, has been successfully marketed as a
romantic player of standards. This show has no business insinuating that a
line of artistic accomplishment connects these three players. Yet without
context, you very well might believe that it does: Mr. Botti's performance
of "My Funny Valentine" is markedly better filmed than the others, with a
darker set and blue lighting from the bottom up.

Mr. Lewis is better when dealing with practiced pluralists: the
it's-all-good wing of jazz musicians, like Mr. Botti, the singer Jane
Monheit and the keyboardist George Duke. Accordingly, smooth jazz ‹ here
it's called "contemporary jazz" ‹ gets an episode of its own. If "Legends of
Jazz" were a series about the reality of the jazz business, or about the
range of things perceived and marketed as jazz, this would seem like a good
idea. But this is apparently a show about the greatest living jazz
musicians. 

The series was produced by WTTW in Chicago and LRSmedia, a company including
Mr. Lewis and Larry Rosen, who used to run the profitable pop-jazz label GRP
Records. After GRP, for a few years in the mid-90's, Mr. Rosen ran a
multimedia company called N2K. Nearly every time there's a questionable
inclusion on the show, it's a former GRP or N2K artist: Mr. Botti, David
Sanborn, Lee Ritenour, Ms. Monheit, Marcus Miller, Al Jarreau.

But parsing the show's conversations and second-guessing its list of
performers may be the wrong approach. It does put a decent number of
excellent musicians on national television. (Others include Eddie Palmieri,
Dave Brubeck, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Benny Golson, Chris Potter and Marcus
Strickland.) Still, that isn't enough. The ultimate test of jazz on
television is whether the music comes across in a hostile medium ‹ how well
it suggests the excitement of performance.

What made "Jazz Scene U.S.A." so powerful definitely was not the musicians'
short interactions with the host, Oscar Brown Jr. It was the direction and
the lighting. You saw amazing camera angles, sustained long enough to allow
concentration: a view from under Jimmy Smith's forearm, or from the polish
on a snare drum, or an aerial shot showing a pianist's chord voicings. The
cameramen got you inside the music and rendered the musicians' faces
sympathetic and fascinating.

Here, the camerawork involves constant, thoughtless slow swirls around the
musicians, a lot of dull full-figure head-on shots from 10 feet away, and
ugly baths of mixed, colored lights. The walls of the set bring to mind a
hotel lobby, busy with wood and textile patterns. The graphics ‹ in an Art
Deco typeface that suggests something like the Cotton Club in the 1920's ‹
are corny and badly handled.

In all its mainstreaming and common-denominator sense, the show seems to
want to deny that jazz is something people care deeply about. But jazz is
deep. It is about sound and resonance and great passion. There is a reason
people become nearly religious about it. You'd hardly know from watching
this.

Legends of Jazz 

With Ramsey Lewis

PBS-TV, beginning this month; check local listings

Larry Rosen and Ramsey Lewis, creators and executive producers; Nicolette
Ferri, producer; produced by LRSmedia and WTTW.