Ken Burns makes a fundamental mistake in his monumental film "Jazz", for which he is certainly to be forgiven. Because it is the expected mistake. He begins in the "Jazz" section of a record store and says, "This is what I am going to make my film about." His mistake, in other words, is to start with the category that the term "Jazz" has come to encompass in today's usage, and work backwards. And what does "Jazz" mean today? A little incident in a nightclub says lots: while a Salsa band was playing, I was telling a woman that my real love was Swing dance, and that the best place for that was the local Jazz cafe. "I didn't know you could Swing dance to Jazz," she replied.

Such am impression would have been inconceivable in 1935. Jazz was a music that was invented for dancers, and dancing was a fundamental part of African-American culture. The music that came to be called "Swing" was Jazz with a particular rhythm that was ideal to a dance, the Lindy Hop, that was newly invented in 1927. The two-beat rhythm of early Jazz matched perfectly the kicks of the Charleston. The Lindy Hop was based on the "Swing Out" invented by Shorty George Snowden, where the partners move in and out from each other in a circular phrase, and the 4-beat rhythm fit that movement perfectly. As this new dance form came to be elaborated with more flamboyant moves, climaxing with the "air steps" first invented by Frankie Manning in 1935, dancers flocked to the bands that could elaborate on the 4-beat rhythm pattern in their music. That is what Swing was.

Now, while Swing was unquestionably a new development in Jazz music, it was conceived at the time to be just that---a new development in Jazz music, rather than anything distinct from Jazz. What was distinguished was "commercial" vs. real Jazz, the main component being whether there was any room in the performance for creativity of interpretation by the soloist.

However, the earlier 2-beat rhythmic form of Jazz essentially died out after the mid 30's---it was out of style. [Slow pieces---blues---also had their own rhythmic forms, ]. The 4-beat music was not new---it can be heard in King Oliver's 1923 "Canal Street Blues"---it just proliferated and diversified, like mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

However, when we arrive at 1945, during the advent of two new musical trends, called Bebop and Rhythm and Blues, we do not find a parallel of what happened during the advent of Swing, but a very curious bifurcation. One of the rhythmic variations of Swing was Boogie Woogie piano, with a driving repetitive beat pattern that added "swung" eighth notes between the 4 main beats, and harmonic changes that typically stayed near "blues" progressions of I IV I V I [check]. That is the rhythm and progression we find in the head of "In the Mood".

Louis Jordan took the Boogie Woogie rhythm into a small combo format. It was fabulous music for dancing. Meanwhile, Charlie Parker developed a soloing style that allowed for extremely fast tempos. He, Dizzy Gillespie and those they inspired wanted to pursue rhythmic and soloing possibilities that dancing bodies could not follow. While Louis Jordan and the new Jazz development called Rhythm and Blues wanted to develop more propulsive dance rhythms than had been heard before.

What happened is that the dancers went with Rhythm and Blues, while the term "Jazz" went with Bebop. Bebop and the other developments that descended from it was based on a relationship between musicians and their imaginations---they pushed technique and musical form to and beyond their limits. Rhythm and Blues, in contrast, was based on a relationship between musicians and dancers, and it pushed musical form to be more and more physically enticing to the audience.

Ken Burns says in his later episodes that Rhythm and Blues took much of the audience away from Jazz. However, if King Oliver had been alive to be able to hear an R&B tune and a Bebop tune, I suspect that he would have identified R&B as his direct descendant. In fact, most of the early Jazz pieces he played were titled "Blues".

If we can identify these two bifurcating lineages of Jazz as the "disembodied" vs. the "embodied" lines (i.e. Bebop vs. R&B), then the real mystery is not why the disembodied line cast off more and more of the traditional Jazz forms until it cornered itself into obscurity as far as the society was concerned. Such a trajectory is what you would predict of an art form which grew out of dance and then rejected dance as too confining. They real mystery is why the term "Jazz" went with the Bebop lineage, instead of with the Rhythm and Blues lineage that maintained most of Jazz's traditional forms---rhythm, vocals, harmony, song structure, improf solos, and dance.

Burns introduces Rhythm and Blues in Jazz Part X, as "a new kind of music". But what was new about it? Not the rhythm, or the blues. Rhythm and Blues was actually a subset of the musical forms of Jazz at the time. That is probably why it was not just called ``Jazz'', because it was a specialization. What was new was its focus on rhythm and the intensity it therefore achieved.

Rhythm and Blues was so successful in developing as "embodied" music that when the White community started to play it, its new name was composed of two body movements---Rock 'n Roll.

So where should Burns have started thinking about Jazz if not the Jazz section of a contemporary record store? He should have started in an African-American home in New Orleans at the turn of the century. Beginning his survey of the horizon from this vantage point, he would have seen how dance and music were the island of joy in the oppressive world of the Jim Crow South. He would have seen how they were part of a system. Then he would have recognized the significance of the bifurcation between Rhythm and Blues and Bebop, the divorce of the concept of Jazz from movement.

The shame of it is that Burns squandered precious opportunity. In particular, he squandered the appearances of Norma Miller and Frankie Manning before his camera. In the many scenes of dancers he shows during his episodes on the Swing Era, it is never mentioned that the dance they were doing bore the mark of Frankie Manning just as much as the music bore the mark of Louis Armstrong. You could say that Norma Miller and Frankie Manning are the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong of Lindy Hop. Frankie Manning brought the Lindy Hop down from its European ballroom posture to the more ``aerodynamic'' horizontal style. And it was Frankie Manning who made the Lindy Hop truly aerodynamic with the creation of ``air steps''. Norma Miller created many air steps herself. It was the dancing they helped create that patrons came night after night to participate in in the Savoy Ballroom and paid the bills for those Swing bands.

You would never guess that from Burns's interviews with Norma and Frankie. He uses them soleley as eyewitnesses to the battle of the bands between Chick Webb and Bennie Goodman, and to comment on the undanceablility of Bebop.