Ask them.
Now that I’ve seen all seven chapters of this series, I can say that the DVD version would be great to own, if the price weren’t quite so steep. I know it’s right at 12 hours worth of stuff, unless they include the “shorts” they aired after the “main feature” had been shown. (I missed one or two of those, thinking the time would be filled with something else.)
The only one that bothered me, in the sense that it didn’t do much to advance the general theme, was the one with the kid going “down south” to be with his uncle. Very poorly done, IMO, and the blues references were much weaker by comparison with the others. All in all, I’d rank the episodes (top to bottom):
- Scorsese’s
- Figgis’s
- Eastwood’s
- The one on BB King
- The Chess/Rap one
- The second one
- the one with the kid and his uncle.
As you can see, some of them made very little lasting impression on me, and except for the musical segments I’d rather have a book as a reference. But having all that archival footage would be a neat thing, I guess.
After saying all that, I’d rate this series at 3 stars, as compared with 1 1/2 or 2 for the Jazz thing by Ken Burns.
You can say that again. Ken Burns seems to think that jazz stopped in the 1950’s, when, for me, that’s when it just started getting interesting.
I just did a little Googling for reviews of the Blues series and ran across one that also compared the Jazz and Blues efforts. The take there was that Burns was wanting to be “the last word” on what Jazz meant and all that. That left him/them in the position of trying to sound scholarly and definitive. The Blues guys had no such ambitions and took their efforts to be commentaries and examples as opposed to treatises. That seems to have worked better for me, personally, since, as you say Musicat, where Burns chose to stop his narrative was about where I came in – the 50’s. So much has happened to the music in those years that to make it appear/sound as if the only thing left to say about Jazz was a bit of floor sweeping, shows a great deal of ignorance and not very much respect for all that’s happened since Coltrane.
The Blues series is the sort of thing that could have plenty of extension and expansion if the dollars are there for it. I’d bet there’s better chance for follow-up episodes to that series than to Jazz. I’d really love to see more coverage of how the various genres within Blues got their starts and how their effects are being felt in the latest attempts to keep Blues going. The Rap episode was good in that respect, but I believe similar efforts could be made in the areas of Country, Pop, even Movie Music.
I doubt that we will ever see a new artist cloning a Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters. They were products of their time. And I think that’s good, because to me all Robert Johnson recordings sound alike, and equally terrible. I can stand them only in an historical context.
But blues inflluence is everywhere in the broad genre of pop music today; jazz, rock, county and more. And that’s a good thing, too. Blues has assimilated, and we are all better for it; black people, white people, and blue people.