The Glow A Great Sound Makes

How do you know someone’s just caught the jazz bug? According to Village Voice critic and “Jazz” author Gary Giddins, when Ken Burns started loving Louis Armstrong as a fan and not just a filmmaker, he got a “glow on his face” that “you can’t fake.”

In an conversation that shared the passionate, improvisational spirit of the music he loves, Giddins’s interview with Big Think ranged over the entirety of his critical career, from his early devotion to film and literature to his own jazz “conversion” to his ongoing reverence for such greats as Cecil Taylor. Giddins’s interview will be posted later this month; his column for the Village Voice can be found here.