Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

The Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has lent his superb compositional and performing talents to the creation of the original score for the new PBS Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise And Fall Of Jack Johnson, a detailed portrait of the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World. Marsalis and Burns last worked together on Burns’s 2000 PBS documentary Jazz, a 10-part series that explored the history of the music, on which Marsalis was Senior Creative Consultant.

The music on Unforgivable Blackness comprises 16 new Marsalis compositions and seven interpretations of material composed by WC Handy, Jelly Roll Morton (3 tracks were drawn from Marsalis’s 1999 release Standard Time, Volume 6: Mr. Jelly Lord, a tribute to the music of Morton), and others. Conjuring up the early 1900s jazz that was current to Jack Johnson’s life (1878-1946), the score provides the perfect backdrop to Burns’s film, capturing all the dramatic tension inherent in Johnson’s story, from the joy of ultimate triumph to the sadness of inescapable oppression.

Ken Burns’ Florentine Films has produced Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson for a PBS airdate of January 17th & 18th, 2005. Noted historian and biographer Geoffrey Ward will release The Autobiography of Jack Johnson in October 2004. PBS Home Video and Paramount DVD will release a DVD in January 2005.
[bluenote.com]