"CounterPunch" editor and progressive journalist Jeffrey St. Clair wrote, "Ken Burns's interminable documentary, "Jazz", starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there. ... Burns is a classicist who is offended by the rawer sounds of the blues, its political dimension and inescapable class dynamic. Instead, Burns fixates on a particular kind of jazz music that appeals to his PBS sensibility: the swing era. It's a genre of jazz that enables Burns to throw around phrases such as 'Ellington is our Mozart.' He sees jazz as an art form in the most culturally elitist sense, as being a museum piece, beautiful but dead, to be savored like a stroll through a gallery of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. ... Burns recoils from the fact that Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and their descendents have taken jazz not toward soft, white-friendly swing sound but deeper into the urban black experience."