Ken Burns is a sycophant. I"m not trying to be mean to the award-winning documentary maestro, but I say it in all earnestness if Burns is willing to persist on insinuating that the tenth episode of his ten-part documentary "Jazz" was inadequate on purpose.

"I refuse to tell the present what it"s about" (my paraphrasing here), is how I"ve read him explain it.

Part ten of "Jazz," "A Masterpiece by Midnight," was an insult to anyone who thinks that there is still hope left for jazz (and doesn"t see Wynton Marsalis as the saviour saint Burns portrays him to be).

If Burns really had no interest in interpreting the present state of jazz, then he wouldn"t have bothered making the tenth episode at all. There would have simply been no need, no point to make.

Yet Burns is no fool and he certainly knew all too well that a massive, corporate-sponsored documentary with his name stamped on it would be absorbed by the masses as "fact" and thus was aware of his ability to cast whatever shade on jazz history he pleased.

Unfortunately, he copped out. He must"ve gotten lazy, because anyone who has truly drowned himself in the sea of extant jazz recordings, perhaps the most prevalently documented musical recording style in the history of human civilization, knows that there are far more interesting things to dwell upon than just the legacies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

This is the music that inspired more pasty-skinned weirdos to lurk alone in dingy basements with their record collections because of transcendental trombone licks they heard when they were 13 than all of the pedantic data crammed into this series put together. That Burns would take on such a subject is a pretty ballsy statement in and of itself. And ... you know, I guess I can"t go blaming Burns for his ignorance, since he has readily admitted that he knew virtually nothing about jazz when he first undertook the task of documenting it.

Oh, wait. Yes I can. In fact, I think I"m supposed to. These days I"m so unsure of what I"m supposed to do that I"ll simply go with my gut instinct and say that I think Ken Burns is a waste of space and that if I ever meet him in a bar, it ain"t gonna be pretty.

You can tell that he"s not a true lover of the music simply by the fact that he considers Grover Washington"s "Mister Magic" and Herbie Hancock"s "Rockit" (yeah, the one that won everything at the first MTV Music Video Awards) appropriate to include on his documentary-inspired, five-compact-disc compilation.

And you could tell the music"s never really touched him when he played most of the legendary solos from Coleman Hawkins" "Body and Soul" and the dinosaur 1942 cut of Charlie Parker"s first-figuring-out the changes to "Cherokee," only to fade the music out during each saxophonist"s most exciting and intense passages in favor of dialogue.

Basically, I think it all comes down to the sheer arrogance of Burns, who was recently spied by the International Herald Tribune hawking his wares at a highfalutin press shindig, claiming he made an alliance "between two big record companies that normally don"t get along" all for the sake of blessing the public with his five-disc box set and various other "hugely great jazz" hits collections marqueed by his name.

"Normally you just get the best of one label," he was quoted explaining. "I used the power of Verve/Universal and Columbia/ Sony to get other labels to come along. So anybody can now go and get a hugely great jazz collection. Ninety four songs out of the 497 that are in the films. Budget price."

Did"ya hear that kids? Burns"ll give you one fifth of his soundtrack for just 60 bucks! What a deal! I implore you to run out to your local drugstore today because this set is certainly almost as comprehensive and revelatory as the (very similar and still available) set Sony and Smithsonian released over ten years ago.

Ugh.

In general, the documentary"s first seven episodes weren"t awful. Although perhaps a tad mind-numbingly boring (even for a jazz fan) and certainly heavy handed in their portrayal of jazz as an all encompassing force that could even rise above America"s ever present and disparate many-coexisting-conflicting-races problem (one scene was so cloying that it consisted solely of the pianist Dave Brubeck as he fought back tears spurred by the remembrance of his first encounter with a black man), the retrospective did a fair job of covering the bases of early jazz.

Certainly, I have my carps. Many of the juxtapositions of photo, music and dialogue were extremely misleading, often pairing conflicting images and music. Meanwhile, precious little of the soundtrack was ever identified.

Certainly, there were patches of quality film making.