Jazz Britannia: mediating the story of British jazz on television

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Jazz Britannia: mediating the story of British jazz on television
Jazz Research Journal
3
145-170
2010/09
eng
17538645, 17538637
Jazz Britannia is a UK-produced three-part BBC television documentary about thepost-war development of jazz in the United Kingdom. We analyse the programmes toexamine how the narrative, form and assumptions of the series can be understood within aseries of contextual debates about jazz historiography, history on television, and the value of historiographic method in public service television. We utilize the debates around Ken
Burns’s US-produced ten-part documentary series Jazz, to develop an argument about the way that the British documentary constructs a very different history from Jazz, but using many of the approaches and techniques deployed by Burns. We locate the series withinquestions of quality television and other forms of television history. Finally, we seek toexplore the way that the programmes produce a totalizing narrative in which the primary material is ordered to tell a predetermined story about innovations and an identifiably British form of jazz.
2
jazz
10.1558/jazz.v3i2.145
Jazz Britannia
2019-11-22T15:39:04Z
DOI.org (Crossref)