On Ken Burns's "Jazz"

Last night the wife and I watched an episode from Ken Burns's Jazz that happened to be on our local PBS channel. The episode spanned the period from 1929 to 1935, the first years of the Depression and the rise of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as superstars.

Two moments struck me. First is something Stanley Crouch says. Unfortunately I don't have TiVO, so I don't have the exact quote. He asks us to imagine a man fed up with his life. He wants to get away, to rush off, make something of himself. His wife says, Yes, if you want to go, I'll go with you. Then he asks us to imagine that man hearing Louis Armstrong playing the solo in "Dinah." Crouch's idea is that Armstrong's freedom in playing is what the pioneer spirit is all about, that jazz improvisation done by the greats is the embodiment of the freedom we seek in our lives. I would extrapolate that and say that any artistic performance might embody that, and that it's not just about freedom, but authenticity.

Another moment that stuck with me was the story Burns tells of Charlie Black, a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas who hears Louis Armstrong playing in an Austin theater and then writes that all his ideas about black people were shaken--if black people, to that young southerner, were meant to be servants, how can you account for Armstrong's genius (and freedom, presumably)? Later, Charles Black became part of the legal team that fought on the side of Brown v. Board of Education in the early 50s. The glaring implication is that art does have the power to change minds.

Ken Burns's movies on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz, all of which I've seen, are heavily idealistic and shellacked with nostalgia, but I wonder if that's their value. Certainly baseball and jazz do provoke these emotions, and each has been instrumental (along with the civil war, of course) in changing race relations. Why is my cynical side fighting my idealism?