I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

- Ken Burns

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

- Ken Burns

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

- Ken Burns

History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.

- Ken Burns

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

- Ken Burns

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

- Ken Burns

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

- Ken Burns

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

- Ken Burns

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

- Ken Burns

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.

- Ken Burns

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

- Ken Burns

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

- Ken Burns

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.

- Ken Burns

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

- Ken Burns

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

- Ken Burns

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

- Ken Burns

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.

- Ken Burns

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.

- Ken Burns

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.

- Ken Burns

You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.

- Ken Burns