[Dixielandjazz] "Jazz" by Giddins and DeVeaux

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is book review. With all these books about Armstrong and Jazz  
coming out, is there a trend forming to renewed interest in jazz? Or  
are they just preaching to the choir?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


December 6, 2009 - NY Times - By Steve Coates


Jazz

By STEVE COATES
“We had a hard time getting people to quiet down and listen,” Percy  
Heath, the Modern Jazz Quartet’s bass player, once explained about his  
innovative ensemble’s early gigs in clubs whose patrons were inclined  
to jabber during performances. “If it got too loud, we’d come off —  
just stop playing and walk off. . . . We were conservatively dressed,  
we played conservative music, and if you didn’t listen you didn’t get  
it.”

The M.J.Q.’s formative role in the “cool jazz” movement of the early  
1950s is just one of a century’s worth of musical milestones counted  
off in JAZZ (Norton, $39.95), Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux’s  
weighty, entertaining history. But Heath’s insistence on comprehension  
through attentive listening sums up the book’s ears-on approach to the  
music. To help you hear — really hear — Giddins and DeVeaux  
intersperse their text with remarkable tabular “listening guides,”  
detailed second-by- second, bar-by-bar descriptive breakdowns of 78  
representative recordings, including many venerable classics (Louis  
Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” Miles  
Davis’s “So What”) and some sweet surprises (the Georgia Sea Island  
Singers’ version of “The Buzzard Lope,” a slave-era folk relic, and  
“Piece Three,” Anthony Braxton’s 1976 vivisection of a traditional  
American march, glockenspiel and all). Alas, the companion set of four  
CDs costs an additional $62.50 from the publisher’s Web site, but for  
serious woodshedders, it’s worth it.

Giddins, a prolific critic on the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center,  
and DeVeaux, who teaches jazz history at the University of Virginia,  
navigate the music’s evolution from its African roots to its current  
global status, with an emphasis on the sociological forces that have  
shaped it. They give a particularly good account of the social  
tensions after World War II, when “the swing jazz that had arisen from  
its New Orleans origins to become an extroverted popular music,  
inseparable from mainstream American culture, turned a sharp corner”  
into the introversion of bebop, which through a multitude of  
permutations is “still the ground on which jazz builds its many and  
varied mansions.”

Not all those mansions are equally congenial. “Even those of us who  
are seemingly enamored of every facet of jazz,” Giddins and DeVeaux  
write, “are likely to roll our eyes at a facet or two.” When sax- 
blowing Bill Clinton claims the great tenor man Lester Young and the  
smooth-jazz king Kenneth Gorelick, a k a Kenny G, as favorites, their  
skepticism is delicious. (“There are many things to dislike about  
smooth jazz,” they add. “For example, everything.”) They justly  
castigate the record industry for scattering CD “bonus tracks” amid  
the tunes of carefully edited classic LPs, many of which should be  
considered integral works “no less than a Beethoven symphony or a  
Verdi opera or ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ ” And they  
regret that “21st century jazz is plagued with countless tributes, re- 
creations and variations on its past”; if there’s a villain in the  
story of jazz, by the authors’ lights it’s the strict historicist and  
“ultimate Reagan-era jazz musician” Wynton Marsalis (though  
“Processional,” his swinging sample track from 1993, will lift you  
right out of your seat).

This isn’t the only book on jazz a fan will want; many of the great  
figures here, of course, merit full biographies of their own. But it’s  
a sure first call.