News
Ken Burns finds a good time to play JAZZ!
Burns is PBS' biggest star, a documentary producer – THE CIVIL WAR, BASEBALL - with a sack of underwriting cash from General Motors and a claim on the undying envy of a thousand other filmmakers. 
Doing a 180 from its normal insanity, PBS is slathering the 18 ½ hour JAZZ across its January schedule. For once, Burns won't be competing with a sweeps month or season premiere week on the commercial networks. The public might actually find JAZZ.
Burns' last project, NOT FOR OURSEVES ALONE, about the early feminist movement, ran in the November sweeps, and NOT many viewers even bothered to search for it.
With JAZZ, Burns would admit only to `”lots of conversations'' with PBS about scheduling.  The original plan was to plop JAZZ onto PBS in September.
PBS backed off from that because of an event going on in Sydney, Australia:
Duhhh! … the Olympics.
So anyway … 10 parts, a few notes short of 19 hours, and it all begins on January 8. The bickering among jazz fans will probably commence on January 9.
Jazz fans have never settled amicably on a definition of the word, let alone a precise pecking order of important artists. Burns said he couldn't have put his own series advisers in the same room without the likelihood of a fistfight!
The series will trace the American form beginning with its creation
when a gumbo of musical styles boiled-over in New Orleans.

Apropos, GUMBO is the title of the initial part of JAZZ showing January 8, 2001.
It had an advance showing at the New Orleans Film Festival in October, 2000.
We were in attendance that evening. 
If they’re all built as great as GUMBO, EMMYS will come!
The series will concentrate on the period from 1917 to 1959,
with a final installment on the years since.
Look for plenty of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, followed by generous servings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Count Basie.
But foremost, said Burns, is Armstrong.
“When I began this project, Louis Armstrong was someone who had a big smile and a handkerchief and transformed popular songs … now, I think we all realize he is the most important person in music -- I didn't say just jazz – IN MUSIC, in the 20th century.
He is to music what Einstein is to physics and what the Wright brothers are to travel. Getting to know this remarkable human being and his contribution -- and, as an added bonus, his great heart -- has been for all of us the joy among many, many joys of working on this project.''
Burns regards the series, JAZZ, as the final leg of a trilogy, after THE CIVIL WAR and BASEBALL, about the three major components of the American experience.
I got your back on that proclamation … Ken my boy!
You might think he was raised on the stuff. But Burns said he was a Beatles and Rolling Stones kid who didn't pay much attention to jazz. When he worked in a record store as a teenager,
“I had only three or four jazz CDs in my very extensive collection”, Burns said.
“I was not a jazz fan, just as I knew nothing about the military history of the Civil War and nothing about the history of baseball. But in the course of this, I can't find my other CDs. I listen to nothing but jazz of all stripes now, and it's taken over my life.
Burns said JAZZ will be the most comprehensive film ever made on the subject. But he knows he won't please everyone, with so many recording artists necessarily having to be consigned to the cutting-room floor.
 “We made a conscious decision here, as we did in THE CIVIL WAR and BASEBALL that if we try to get encyclopedic we would, for the sake of accuracy of lists, denude our narrative,'' Burns said, “We’d much rather tell a whole through-narrative of Armstrong well, and a dozen or so other people, than a set of lists; so I can tell you right now that Erroll Garner, who was a favorite of mine, is not in it, in favor of us spending a little bit more time with John Coltrane and Sonny Rawlins and others of that era.''

Theatre
GOOD NEWS at The Ty Tracy New Orleans Recreation Department Theatre in Gallier Hall, 545 St. Charles Ave. January 5-14. Tickets $10 Telephone 1-504-565-7860
Actors are teenagers; except the Coach and Trainer.
The 1927 DeSylva-Brown-Henderson collegiate musical, set at Tait College, where football takes precedence over academics and the kids spend their time singing:
The Best Things In Life Are Free, Button Up Your Overcoat, Lucky In Love, and dancing to The Varsity Drag.
New Orleans’ NORD Program for children/youths was one of the foremost of its kind in the country.  Many cities adapted theirs after NORD’s well organized/run program.

PRIVATE EYES by Steven Dietz at Tulane University Lupin Theater
Directed by Ron Gural
January 30-February 4, 2001
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 at 8:00 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
Feb. 3 & 4 at 2:00 p.m. Saturday & Sunday
Lupin Theater

HAMLET plays at Tulane on two dates: January 5 and 11 at Dixon Hall
THOUGHTS
NORD (New Orleans Recreation Department) Theater celebrates its 40^th year!
This city-sponsored stage’s founding director was, and he remains so today, Mr. Ty Tracy.
For Forty years, three generations, 120 NORD productions; Mr. Tracy has indoctrinated thousands of young people in the ways and wisdom of the stage, and of life itself.
GOOD NEWS (see above) was also his first production, circa 1960.
He’s made it through five city administrations … that’s telling you how good this man is!
He sought-out (brought-out and demanded) vibrant, upbeat, enthusiastic youngsters.
Discipline, commitment, pro-ject, HIT IT! His mantras in the beginning and now.
A motto for this up-and-at-‘em Pied Piper of upbeat musical theater?:
 ‘Get on, sing your song and get off.’ And, “keep it moving, keep it fast, and keep it fun!
Don’t give the audience too much time to think about what they’re seeing; just entertain them!”
To honor Mr. Tracy’s extraordinary contributions to local theater, the city recently named NORD’s Gallier Hall home, the TY TRACY THEATRE.

© 2001 Steve&Lucille Esquerré ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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