Needs more Sun Ra!!
The doc is a classic. I love it, but it's not perfect. A lot of musicians were left out. Please feel free to give some names.
the fact sun ra was left out of this series is really unforgivable. i understand that this is a specific documentary series about jazz in america, but it's a shame it didn't touch on jazz in other parts of the world. check out the documentary on MPS records.
Sun Ra was too far out for the makers of this series to grasp.
It was a great doc for covering the years from 1900 up to late bop. They had a hard time understanding later stuff that would make jazz's position in contemporary music much clearer. To wit, they criticize electric Miles pretty thoroughly without noting how influential it was, and omit the entire lineage of fusion (and noise) musicians from the late 60s and 70s onward.
Ra critically influenced John Coltrane's turn to spirituality and overtly spiritual music, but he never gets any credit for it, to cite one example among many of how important he is to the history of jazz . He also got into moog and electronics long before Davis, and contributed big band and space aesthetics to funk in the 70s, etc, etc. I think Ra is even more popular now than he was in 2001, when Jazz was released.