JAM Magazine: April/May 1998 Issue: Storyville

BLUE: THE MURDER OF JAZZ
by Eric Nisenson
247 pp, plus discography, notes, bibliography and index; published November 1997, St, Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010; ISBN 0-312-16785-7

Since his much heralded arrival in the early '80s, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has generated two disparate, yet passionate schools of thought: a) he is a magnificently gifted and versatile musician who has turned a whole new generation on to the importance of America's indigenous musical art form, and b) he is an arrogant proponent of a kind of myopic revivalism who only has eyes for ground that has already been covered. ("Didn't we get it right the first time?" asked Miles Davis.)

If you agree with the latter, or even if you find yourself straddling both sides of the line, you will want to explore Eric Nisenson's musings in Blue: The Murder of Jazz, a 250 page exposé on the lack of innovation in jazz today and the forces Nisenson feels are to blame. A few quotes from the author:

"Jazz without innovation is a dead art form." (A recurring theme throughout.)

"Maybe jazz's time is simply over. After all, it was born with the century, so maybe it's not a coincidence that as the century comes to an end, so does jazz, or at least jazz as we've commonly known it." (See this issue's cover story.)

And about Marsalis:

"As with other movements in the course of jazz history, it was again a confluence of factors that led to (this) new (neo-classicist) movement in jazz; the increasing vapidity of fusion; the passing away of many of the most important jazz innovators; the reemergence of some of a number of prominent jazz figures from jazz's past such as Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin and altoist Frank Morgan... All that was needed was a young leader."

Again, this is a book with a specific point of view. And while Marsalis and his progeny are cut some slack for increasing the popularity and awareness of jazz, Nisenson is direct and ruthless about the downside of what he feels the "neos" ultimately stand for.

"If the musical philosophy of the neoclassicists had dominated the jazz of the past like it does the jazz of the present," Nisenson writes, "one must wonder if jazz really would have developed, and also whether it would have attracted the great men and women who devoted their lives to this music."

Something worth mulling over in the waning days of the 20th century.

Incidentally, if you are saddled with the anal-retentive eye of a nit-picky editor, you will notice an unusual number of typos and editing flaws in this book. The power of Nisenson's prose is somewhat diminished by these occasional distractions ("Wren" Carter instead of "Ron") and one wishes Blue would have been given an additional proofing. Still, the impact of the author's forthright candor will cause the reader to either nod in gleeful agreement, or dismiss Nisenson as a disgruntled cynic. There is no middle ground here.

-- Mike Metheny

THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
by Ted Gioia
Oxford, 471 pages, $30

MONK
by Laurent de Wilde
Marlowe, 214 pages, $22.95

SWINGIN' THE DREAM:
Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture
by Lewis A. Erenberg
Chicago, 336 pages, $28

Miles Davis once told an interviewer, "I'll give you the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker."

Ted Gioia, a musician, writer and historian, takes two hundred thousand words to spin the rest of the story, from its roots in Africa, black blues and ragtime music to the complex, atonal improvisations at New York's Knitting Factory club today. It is a story of places: New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, Kansas City, Los Angeles and back to New York, the Big Apple. It is a story of small combos and big bands playing myriad styles: traditional, swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, third stream, free and back to bebop. Most of all it's the story of the players: Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Parker, Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and scores more.

Jazz. The black American art, adored abroad and underappreciated at home. And like cinema, the art of our century. The ephemeral art that created a lifestyle. The improvisational art that ultimately touched all the fine arts of our time. Here it is, complete and up to date in a single volume -- a spectacular achievement, sorely needed as the art's first century comes to a close. (We've been waiting a decade for the third volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental, innovative history to take us past 1945!)

The History of Jazz fundamentally offers the received wisdom of mainline jazz critics and musicians. There is little in the line of revaluation or significant new insights as offered by Schuller, though Gioia does some splendid exegeses on the masters. He is at his best on the crucial 1945-60 period that includes Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Monk, Davis, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Dolphy and Coleman. Unlike Schuller, however, he does not reproduce a single bar of music, apparently writing for the layman; yet he salts the narrative with highly technical musical terms that go unexplained.

Gioia's analyses can be detailed and precise. He deftly pinpoints the truly progressive works of Wynton Marsalis before the celebrated trumpeter-composer regressed into neoclassicism. But too often he simply dubs a work or artist as brilliant or important without amplification. For example, he correctly calls Ellington's "Braggin' in Brass" a "masterpiece," "stunning" and "breathtaking" without actually describing its astonishing hocket technique, where each of three trombonists plays every third successive note in a complex musical line, giving the startling effect of a single player soloing at breakneck speed.

This kind of history is perforce derivative, drawing on every conceivable reference source. Which means he can recycle misinformation, such as identifying Ralph Burns' composition "Early Autumn" as the fourth movement of his "Summer Sequence" suite. "Summer Sequence Part IV" actually is a different work, recorded by Woody Herman's band a year before "Early Autumn."

Gioia is commendably inclusive, discussing schools, trends and musicians that too many other critics ignore or dismiss as not in the true jazz tradition. But in doing so he devotes excess space to popular but minor figures, such as Eddie Condon and George Shearing, while bypassing the contributions of talents such as saxophonist Bud Freeman or pianist Andrew Hill. He notes only the names of trumpeter-composer Tom Harrell, bassist Christian McBride and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett -- and completely overlooks the remarkable tenor saxophonist David Sanchez -- yet they are arguably today's leading figures on their respective instruments.

He also has an annoying need to pigeonhole -- sometimes questionably. He rigidly categorizes certain players as "cool" or "hard bop," then goes on to adopt literary, catch-all categories such as "postmodern" and "deconstructionist" to describe many post-1970s players. Grab-bag terminologies, however literary or chic, can blur distinctions instead of make them. By Gioia's overly broad definitions, pianist-composer Monk might be considered a postmodernist because he sometimes incorporated the older stride-piano style; his famed solo on Davis' "The Man I Love" or his riff on "Carolina Moon" would make him a deconstructionist.

Monk himself is the subject of a fascinating new biography by the American-born French pianist Laurent de Wilde. It is a loving, analytical, philosophical and very French rant on the life and music of one of the most unique, influential figures in the history of jazz. Far from your standard jazz-bio chronology of recordings and gigs interspersed with anecdotes, the slim volume Monk loops and circles and roars about every aspect of the subject from his technique to the shape of his ears. At the same time, it offers a wealth of insights into the quirky, distinctive music of this modern master -- who sadly descended into autistic madness in his last decade -- and why his reputation continues to grow long after his death.

Gioia's work in part places the evolution of jazz styles into sociohistoric context -- particularly turn-of-the-century New Orleans where jazz was being born, and the civil-rights/black-power era of the '60s when free jazz emerged. Another new book, Swingin' the Dream, by Lewis Erenberg, a cultural historian at Loyola University of Chicago, is devoted to America in the big band swing era, that special age when jazz was both the art music and the popular music of its time.

Erenberg, a knowledgeable jazz fan, recounts the familiar story of how Benny Goodman's band surged to popularity, how swing became a national obsession and how the black bands that started it all were eventually cut into a share of the glory -- but only a share. The story is carried beyond the war years, through the decline of the big bands and the rise of bebop, an introverted art music that virtually prided itself on its alienation from the masses.

The story is told from the viewpoint of the audience, the society itself, and it thus becomes a saga of race in the America of the 1930s as played out in the music business. Though Erenberg is somewhat repetitive and academic, there is much rich material here, notably in the relationship between the music and the political left. He also recounts the cruel racism that marred the lives of black musicians, as when the great singer Billie Holiday, while working a
hotel ballroom with Artie Shaw's band, could not stay at the hotel and was forced to use the service elevators.

As the music stands on the brink of its second century, two large issues emerge, with both questions touched upon briefly by Gioia. First, will there ever be another towering leader in the mold of Parker, Ellington or Armstrong, who reshapes and changes all of jazz music in his lifetime and beyond? The last such overwhelming figure was Coltrane, who died in 1967 and has never been succeeded.

The even larger question relates to the first, and it's faced by all the arts today: does the concept of modernism, of "progress" in art history, still have meaning? A clear line of progress, of continuous modernization, can be traced from Armstrong through Parker, then to Coleman and Coltrane; but then what? In Coleman's Free Jazz and Coltrane's Ascension, both from the 1960s, we have jazz equivalents of "Finnegan's Wake," the ultimate masterworks of modernism. Now, having acknowledged them, do they represent a direction or a dead end? Joyce's final testament gave rise to no new school of literature; free jazz continues as a living music today, but we have not gone "beyond" it, other than to incorporate and adapt its elements into a melding of modern styles. On the other hand, ignoring the tomfoolery of "postmodernism" in architecture, Frank Gehry has shown us there is a truly progressive next step after Mies.

The great critic Whitney Balliett called jazz the "sound of surprise." What sound will be our next surprise?

-- Don Rose

(This review appeared in the March 1, 1998 Chicago Tribune and was reprinted with the permission of the author. Don Rose is a past political consultant for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Chicago Mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington. He was also once a roommate of Fats Navarro and friend of Charlie Parker. He now devotes himself to free-lance writing on food, travel and the arts. -- Ed.)

RETURN TO APRIL/MAY 1998 MAIN INDEX

------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors 1996-2001. All rights reserved.






	Search our site:		BLUE: THE MURDER OF JAZZ by Eric Nisenson 247 pp, plus discography, notes, bibliography and index; published November 1997, St, Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010; ISBN 0-312-16785-7 Since his much heralded arrival in the early '80s, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has generated two disparate, yet passionate schools of thought: a) he is a magnificently gifted and versatile musician who has turned a whole new generation on to the importance of America's indigenous musical art form, and b) he is an arrogant proponent of a kind of myopic revivalism who only has eyes for ground that has already been covered. ("Didn't we get it right the first time?" asked Miles Davis.) If you agree with the latter, or even if you find yourself straddling both sides of the line, you will want to explore Eric Nisenson's musings in Blue: The Murder of Jazz, a 250 page exposé on the lack of innovation in jazz today and the forces Nisenson feels are to blame. A few quotes from the author: "Jazz without innovation is a dead art form." (A recurring theme throughout.) "Maybe jazz's time is simply over. After all, it was born with the century, so maybe it's not a coincidence that as the century comes to an end, so does jazz, or at least jazz as we've commonly known it." (See this issue's cover story.) And about Marsalis: "As with other movements in the course of jazz history, it was again a confluence of factors that led to (this) new (neo-classicist) movement in jazz; the increasing vapidity of fusion; the passing away of many of the most important jazz innovators; the reemergence of some of a number of prominent jazz figures from jazz's past such as Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin and altoist Frank Morgan... All that was needed was a young leader." Again, this is a book with a specific point of view. And while Marsalis and his progeny are cut some slack for increasing the popularity and awareness of jazz, Nisenson is direct and ruthless about the downside of what he feels the "neos" ultimately stand for. "If the musical philosophy of the neoclassicists had dominated the jazz of the past like it does the jazz of the present," Nisenson writes, "one must wonder if jazz really would have developed, and also whether it would have attracted the great men and women who devoted their lives to this music." Something worth mulling over in the waning days of the 20th century. Incidentally, if you are saddled with the anal-retentive eye of a nit-picky editor, you will notice an unusual number of typos and editing flaws in this book. The power of Nisenson's prose is somewhat diminished by these occasional distractions ("Wren" Carter instead of "Ron") and one wishes Blue would have been given an additional proofing. Still, the impact of the author's forthright candor will cause the reader to either nod in gleeful agreement, or dismiss Nisenson as a disgruntled cynic. There is no middle ground here. -- Mike Metheny THE HISTORY OF JAZZ by Ted Gioia Oxford, 471 pages, $30 MONK by Laurent de Wilde Marlowe, 214 pages, $22.95 SWINGIN' THE DREAM: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture by Lewis A. Erenberg Chicago, 336 pages, $28 Miles Davis once told an interviewer, "I'll give you the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker." Ted Gioia, a musician, writer and historian, takes two hundred thousand words to spin the rest of the story, from its roots in Africa, black blues and ragtime music to the complex, atonal improvisations at New York's Knitting Factory club today. It is a story of places: New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, Kansas City, Los Angeles and back to New York, the Big Apple. It is a story of small combos and big bands playing myriad styles: traditional, swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, third stream, free and back to bebop. Most of all it's the story of the players: Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Parker, Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and scores more. Jazz. The black American art, adored abroad and underappreciated at home. And like cinema, the art of our century. The ephemeral art that created a lifestyle. The improvisational art that ultimately touched all the fine arts of our time. Here it is, complete and up to date in a single volume -- a spectacular achievement, sorely needed as the art's first century comes to a close. (We've been waiting a decade for the third volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental, innovative history to take us past 1945!) The History of Jazz fundamentally offers the received wisdom of mainline jazz critics and musicians. There is little in the line of revaluation or significant new insights as offered by Schuller, though Gioia does some splendid exegeses on the masters. He is at his best on the crucial 1945-60 period that includes Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Monk, Davis, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Dolphy and Coleman. Unlike Schuller, however, he does not reproduce a single bar of music, apparently writing for the layman; yet he salts the narrative with highly technical musical terms that go unexplained. Gioia's analyses can be detailed and precise. He deftly pinpoints the truly progressive works of Wynton Marsalis before the celebrated trumpeter-composer regressed into neoclassicism. But too often he simply dubs a work or artist as brilliant or important without amplification. For example, he correctly calls Ellington's "Braggin' in Brass" a "masterpiece," "stunning" and "breathtaking" without actually describing its astonishing hocket technique, where each of three trombonists plays every third successive note in a complex musical line, giving the startling effect of a single player soloing at breakneck speed. This kind of history is perforce derivative, drawing on every conceivable reference source. Which means he can recycle misinformation, such as identifying Ralph Burns' composition "Early Autumn" as the fourth movement of his "Summer Sequence" suite. "Summer Sequence Part IV" actually is a different work, recorded by Woody Herman's band a year before "Early Autumn." Gioia is commendably inclusive, discussing schools, trends and musicians that too many other critics ignore or dismiss as not in the true jazz tradition. But in doing so he devotes excess space to popular but minor figures, such as Eddie Condon and George Shearing, while bypassing the contributions of talents such as saxophonist Bud Freeman or pianist Andrew Hill. He notes only the names of trumpeter-composer Tom Harrell, bassist Christian McBride and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett -- and completely overlooks the remarkable tenor saxophonist David Sanchez -- yet they are arguably today's leading figures on their respective instruments. He also has an annoying need to pigeonhole -- sometimes questionably. He rigidly categorizes certain players as "cool" or "hard bop," then goes on to adopt literary, catch-all categories such as "postmodern" and "deconstructionist" to describe many post-1970s players. Grab-bag terminologies, however literary or chic, can blur distinctions instead of make them. By Gioia's overly broad definitions, pianist-composer Monk might be considered a postmodernist because he sometimes incorporated the older stride-piano style; his famed solo on Davis' "The Man I Love" or his riff on "Carolina Moon" would make him a deconstructionist. Monk himself is the subject of a fascinating new biography by the American-born French pianist Laurent de Wilde. It is a loving, analytical, philosophical and very French rant on the life and music of one of the most unique, influential figures in the history of jazz. Far from your standard jazz-bio chronology of recordings and gigs interspersed with anecdotes, the slim volume Monk loops and circles and roars about every aspect of the subject from his technique to the shape of his ears. At the same time, it offers a wealth of insights into the quirky, distinctive music of this modern master -- who sadly descended into autistic madness in his last decade -- and why his reputation continues to grow long after his death. Gioia's work in part places the evolution of jazz styles into sociohistoric context -- particularly turn-of-the-century New Orleans where jazz was being born, and the civil-rights/black-power era of the '60s when free jazz emerged. Another new book, Swingin' the Dream, by Lewis Erenberg, a cultural historian at Loyola University of Chicago, is devoted to America in the big band swing era, that special age when jazz was both the art music and the popular music of its time. Erenberg, a knowledgeable jazz fan, recounts the familiar story of how Benny Goodman's band surged to popularity, how swing became a national obsession and how the black bands that started it all were eventually cut into a share of the glory -- but only a share. The story is carried beyond the war years, through the decline of the big bands and the rise of bebop, an introverted art music that virtually prided itself on its alienation from the masses. The story is told from the viewpoint of the audience, the society itself, and it thus becomes a saga of race in the America of the 1930s as played out in the music business. Though Erenberg is somewhat repetitive and academic, there is much rich material here, notably in the relationship between the music and the political left. He also recounts the cruel racism that marred the lives of black musicians, as when the great singer Billie Holiday, while working a hotel ballroom with Artie Shaw's band, could not stay at the hotel and was forced to use the service elevators. As the music stands on the brink of its second century, two large issues emerge, with both questions touched upon briefly by Gioia. First, will there ever be another towering leader in the mold of Parker, Ellington or Armstrong, who reshapes and changes all of jazz music in his lifetime and beyond? The last such overwhelming figure was Coltrane, who died in 1967 and has never been succeeded. The even larger question relates to the first, and it's faced by all the arts today: does the concept of modernism, of "progress" in art history, still have meaning? A clear line of progress, of continuous modernization, can be traced from Armstrong through Parker, then to Coleman and Coltrane; but then what? In Coleman's Free Jazz and Coltrane's Ascension, both from the 1960s, we have jazz equivalents of "Finnegan's Wake," the ultimate masterworks of modernism. Now, having acknowledged them, do they represent a direction or a dead end? Joyce's final testament gave rise to no new school of literature; free jazz continues as a living music today, but we have not gone "beyond" it, other than to incorporate and adapt its elements into a melding of modern styles. On the other hand, ignoring the tomfoolery of "postmodernism" in architecture, Frank Gehry has shown us there is a truly progressive next step after Mies. The great critic Whitney Balliett called jazz the "sound of surprise." What sound will be our next surprise? -- Don Rose (This review appeared in the March 1, 1998 Chicago Tribune and was reprinted with the permission of the author. Don Rose is a past political consultant for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Chicago Mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington. He was also once a roommate of Fats Navarro and friend of Charlie Parker. He now devotes himself to free-lance writing on food, travel and the arts. -- Ed.) RETURN TO APRIL/MAY 1998 MAIN INDEX ------------------------------------------------------------------------ © Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors 1996-2001. All rights reserved.