Ken Burns' JAZZ starts Monday on PBS!

I'm really looking forward to this, but don't know when I'll have time to watch that much TV, even on time-delay. I'm sure there'll be much fascinating material, even though Sugarbrie's reservations sound realistic. Along these lines, note that all of jazz from 1961 to the present is covered in a single episode, the last! And, the series concludes with Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. A little self-congratulatory, perhaps?--considering that Warsalis was Burns' senior advisor on this project. So, perhaps Marsalis' conservative tastes and (may I say without being too disrespectful) smugness is reflected throughout the whole series. But, as I say, I look forward to a lot of fascinating material. However, it could be summer before I am able to view all the tapes.

I sat in the audience at Wolf Trap near Washington DC for the Marsalis/Lincoln Center group last summer. Great Concert??

Well if Marsalis is going to be the main commentator you can bet there will be more than a fair share devoted to Satchmo, his hero. Time Magazine had an article on the series and noted that several very important jazz figures were given scant coverage and Burns really didn't have too great an interest in jazz prior to conception of this project.

The series will be flawed, Marsalis is conceited--a fabulous technician of limited musicality--but it's better than nothing. See the dissing of the series by the great W. Balliet in the New Yorker.

What is evident in all of Ken Burns' documentaries that we may not pick up on in "The Civil War" because it is a important part; is that Burns tends to spend a lot of time giving the viewer a civil rights lecture and putting a civil rights bent on everything he covers. I learned very little about Thomas Jefferson the man, and his importance to our nation, and instead saw hours of a account his owning slaves, whether he had a baby with one of them, and how we should all feel about it.