Mario Bauza (left), Marco Rizo, composer of the theme music for “I Love Lucy,” and Dizzy Gillespie; at Bauza’s 80th Anniversary Celebration at Symphony Space in Hall in 1991
This piece was published by The Washington Post on January 2001
Popular music offers a window into the society that creates it. But in “Jazz,” the 10-part, 19-hour documentary that winds up its PBS run next week, filmmaker Ken Burns peered at life in the United States through a narrow window.
He has construed jazz — and the society that created it — almost completely in terms of black and white. In the United States of “Jazz,” the Latin music and musicians who were so important to the development of this art form — and Latinos and their culture in general — barely merit a footnote.
