The fact is, even art needs stories. Even art needs aura. Even art needs magic. And "Jazz" provides those things. It takes something great and treats it as if it were great. It grabs an ancient, scratchy Louis Armstrong solo and puts it under glass, treats it like it's "Petruschka" or "Water Lilies" or "Ode to Autumn." We are forced, at aesthetic gunpoint, to listen with a different ear. And it pays off.

For in the end the artifice just allows another perspective. You don't have to stay there. The grand story Burns tells and illustrates with such relentless dignity -- All these heroes! All those masterpieces! All those deaths! It's as if life were played for keeps! -- lets you have your musical cake and eat it too.

Listening to Paul Chambers' bass introducing the theme to "So What," we still ski over the same familiar drifts of sound we have so many times before -- but now, looking at a photo of Miles' etched, disturbingly noble face, we have a story to hang it on. Those tunes we've heard a thousand times suddenly become double: They seem to embody the distilled yearning shown on a young Negro boy's face, the innocence of two exultant jitterbuggers, the weary grace of soldiers coming home, in photographs that break your heart because of everything they promised about America.

"Jazz" isn't perfect. There's some grandiosity, and some too-pat equations between musical evolution and social change, and some windy philosophizing. All of these are predictable deformations, resulting from Burns and writer Geoffrey Ward's sociological-historical approach. Yes, not that many people would watch a 10-part documentary about harmonic developments in post-bop jazz, but sometimes a soprano sax is just a soprano sax, not an emblem of all the yearning and hope and pent-up racial ambiguity that has haunted this mighty, wounded land since its birth. But a big story needs a big theme, and in a way it almost doesn't matter what that theme is, as long as it's suitably austere and stays out of the way. When the narrative rhetoric gets too high-blown (which isn't often: Ward is a very good writer) you can just tune it out, treat it like a temporarily square set of chords laid down by a good pianist. The melody keeps going.

The commentators are, in general, first-rate, from the reflective Gerald Early to the pungent Stanley Crouch to the encyclopedic and passionate Gary Giddins. Wynton Marsalis, the musician who does the lion's share of the commentary, is mostly charming -- actually, far more than I expected -- with his boyish enthusiasm for the Old Masters. (Although I'm not convinced by his assertion that the musical negotiations between jazz players have anything at all to do with democracy.) The wet kiss Burns plants on him at the end, crediting him with virtually single-handedly "saving" jazz, is a little irritating, but only a little.

Speaking of "saving" jazz, the biggest gripe "Jazz's" detractors have is that its story essentially ends after Miles' "Bitches Brew" (1969), giving only the most cursory of nods to the last 30-plus years of the music. But Burns and Ward made a conscious and, I believe, legitimate choice not to deal with the contemporary scene: They didn't want to be put in a position of making critical judgments that weren't sanctioned by history.

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