Ken Burns Give You Something

In January 2001, the KEN BURNS’ JAZZ promotional blizzard hit New York City. Billboards, banners on buses, elaborate retail displays in book and record stores, feature coverage in every major print, radio and TV outlet, chatter around the water cooler at the office — total saturation. I’d already been indoctrinated against Burns by University of Iowa film studies professors, and early reviews suggested that JAZZ basically dismissed post-60s avant-garde acts like AACM and Cecil Taylor, so I had no interest in watching the show, and I resented its invasion of all corners of my world. The final straw for me was an uninvited email from Amazon.com urging me to purchase official JAZZ merchandise and to watch a series of Burns interview clips. My first instinct was to delete the email. Instead, I impulsively clicked the link to the clips, and soon enough I was shooting excerpts of them off of the computer screen with my Mini-DV camcorder. While editing the clips, I told myself I was making some kind of crazy 21^st Century video jazz — Burns, Wynton Marsalis, and the rest of the traditionalists be damned. By the time I finished the edit, the rage and resentment were gone (I’d even come to feel a strange fondness for Burns and his self-promoting incantations), and I moved on with my life.

"Redeems (?) the whitest man in America, Ken Burns, by making him scat, riff and syncopate more than all the hours of his multi-PBS JAZZ series ever attempted. The void of the PBS drone is regenerated in a cut and slice Shiva dance of creation."

— Kyle Henry, Cinematexas, September 2002

“Subverts the famed documentarian's notoriously finicky filmmaking with a jittery cut-and-paste style worthy of William Burroughs.”

— Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle, September 2002

This video is also available on Kent Lambert Videoworks: Volume 1