Documentary realism is predicated upon a radical distinction between the saying and the said, or more broadly the representing and the represented, which can also be understood as between the filmic and the real. While the real world does not have a musical score, this does not deny music a place in documentary, but instead locates it either materially in the depicted scene or fully outside the scene as part of the filmic world. Ben Winters’ characterization of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in fiction film will serve as a starting point to consider the complex use of music in Ken Burns’ Jazz (2001), a ten-part nineteen-hour expository documentary produced for PBS.
Jazz is an ideal text through which to examine the place of music and the real in documentary film for three reasons. First, and most obviously, music is at its centre, as music is its subject matter. It features musical performances, and musical underscoring is pervasive throughout the series. Second, Jazz is not an experimental or avant-garde work. Its manner of address is typical of the expository mode: commentary is addressed to the viewer with images as counter-point, editing establishes rhetorical rather than spatial and temporal continuity, complementary first-person testimonies are counterpoised to create the impression of objectivity, and anecdotal history results in a stockpiling of knowledge (Nichols 34-5). In other words, Jazz is conventional and signifies in an easily understood manner.
Thus, despite jazz journalist Francis Davis’ reservations regarding Burns’ version of jazz history, which “shows tendencies toward cockeyed legend, cut-rate sociology and amateur psychoanalysis,” she describes the series as “enjoyable television” that is “good for jazz” with “perceptive commentary” and a “wealth of great music” (Davis 78). In a similar vein, Vivien Ellen Rose and Julie Corley observe that Burns relies upon “formulaic cinematography and musical treatments” that are “artistic” while also noting that these same elements “detract from the historical endeavour by confusing past and present” (56). Third, as these comments indicate, Jazz is rhetorical – it is an elaborate epideictic, a speech of praise to a genre of music and to America.