Words matter. These are the best Ken Burns Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You don’t work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
Like a layer on a pearl, you can’t specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don’t believe that Miles sold out but I’m not in a position to say.
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn’t mean that the other 39 are bad.
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
I don’t use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there’s very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don’t believe that Miles sold out but I’m not in a position to say.
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there’s very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.
History’s just been made for sale to an inside deal.
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
One of the things I really like about Ford’s films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn’t born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
