In the Mood to Exclude

Documentarian and perenially non-getter of jazz Ken Burns must really have it out for Glenn Miller. Not only did his 5 disc, 94 song comprehensive history-of-jazz-according-to-Ken-Burns box-set only include 1 of Glenn Miller's songs, but the otherwise glowing liner notes decide to take cheap, unwarranted pot shots at that lone inclusion.

The song in question is none other than the genre-defining In the Mood, and if you haven't heard it, yes you have. Everyone has. Likewise, you'd be hard pressed to find a member of the American public who hasn't at least accidentally heard Chattanooga Choo Choo, Moonlight Serenade, Tuxedo Junction, or Pennsylvania 6-5000, all conspicuously absent from Ken Burns' Jazz, which is subtitled, "The Story of America's Music," and which should be sub-subtitled, "With the Glaring Exception of Glenn Miller."

To be sure, I'm all for deconstructing the canon, but to pretend that Glenn Miller wasn't extremely influential in the history of jazz is just silly. One could argue that his songs were too commercial, or that his signature clarinet and tenor sax lines with alto saxes harmonizing had been done before. But keep in mind that the compilation's subtitle, undoubtedly supplied by Ken Burns himself, is "The Story of America's Music." Not "A Redefinition of the Innovation of America's Music," nor "A Revisionist Analysis of the Truly Exceptional Standouts of America's Music," nor even, "A Case Against Glenn Miller." Ken Burns commits an egregious act of dishonesty here, akin to a historian pretending that Nixon wasn't the president, simply because he didn't like Nixon's policies.

One measly song. Compare that to his big band rival-in-popularity Duke Ellington, who came in at a whopping 9 songs. Ellington accounts for nearly ten percent of the music on the compilation; Miller is just shy of a single percent.

And talk about adding insult to injury, here is the entirety of Ken Burns' write up of In the Mood:

One of the great musical questions of the 20th century is: why "In the Mood?" What was it about Glenn Miller's recording of this above-average but by no means exceptional instrumental that made it the quintessential theme song for an entire era? The riffs all came from the great black bands of the late Twenties, Miller's band could and did play harder and better music, and yet this recording continues to sell into the 21st century.

There it is, folks. That's it. Asks a question, talks about how unexceptional the song is, never even bothers trying to answer the question it asks, and moves on its merry way towards talking about Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra being among "the greatest units of all time."

Walter Benjamin claimed that, just as Freud analyzed the linguistic slips in language that revealed the workings of individual's subconscious, so too can a close reading of a text reveal certain subconscious elements of an ideology. So bearing that in mind, let's take a slightly closer look to see what's really going on with ol' Ken. The phrase that sticks out the most glaringly, at least initially, is "above-average but by no means exceptional." Yet Burns goes on to say that it was "the quintessential theme song for an entire era. This seems pretty plainly to contradict the "by no means exceptional." Isn't "By no means" a phrase that means, basically, "any way you slice it?" No matter how you look at In the Mood, according to Burns, it is unexceptional. There are, in other words, no means by which this song can be considered exceptional. Odd, then, that the quintessential song of an era is unexceptional even on the grounds that it is the quintessential song of an era. What Burns really means, then, is "by my own arbitrary and unelucidated means."

"The great black bands of the twenties" is another doozy of a phrase. And this one is a little more enlightening. Here, Ken Burns shows his real reason for all the vituperation. In something of a hilarious hypocrasy, Burns castigates Miller for stealing from the black man what is rightly the black man's. Nevermind the fact that Burns is himself engaged in a subtle, institutionalized form of racism, in which the white man is the chronicler, the analyzer, the theoretician. Those who wish to remain safe according to Burns standards, take note: making money off of black music by playing it is bad; making money off of black music by talking about it is a-ok.

Of course, concedes Burns, Miller's band did play harder and better music, as though the difficulty of a piece has any bearing on its value as music. I think it's more than a little safe to say that Burns doesn't play an instrument himself, nor does he have much in the way of formal musical training. It might be for this reason that he doesn't really seem to get the whole idea of an artistic enterprise. Perhaps confusing Jazz with his other documentary, Baseball, Burns construes music as something of a sport. Those who can construct the most intricate, layered, polyrhythmic, and otherwise difficult compositions are, in essence, the winners. But, to put the matter bluntly, music ain't a fuckin sport, it's an art. And the purpose of art isn't to be complex or showy, it's to say something valuable about the human condition at a given time. For all his talk about 64th notes, 12-bar choruses, and syncopated polyrhythms, Burns doesn't get what's really at stake in this music. If he did, he'd understand why In the Mood so perfectly captures that particular historical moment. It's dancy, but not too dancy. It has a distinct sauntering-through-a-party feel, but it also makes the perfect accompaniment to a high speed pursuit. The song is equally at home in a relaxing atmosphere and as part of an upbeat, vibrant nightlife. Miller wisely never mentioned what, precisely, he was in the mood for, which gives the song a sort of open-ended transcendence. It is at once the unique encapsulation of a particular moment in American history and a timeless testament to music as a universal language.

But otherwise, you know, unexceptional.