Reading Jazz edited by Robert Gottlieb
McConnell, Frank
DIZZY WITH ECSTASY Reading Jazz A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism Edited by Robert Gottlieb Pantheon Books, $37.59,1J368 pp. Frank McConnell My all-time favorite Dumb...
...For those who don't know it, this book is an indispensable guide...
...Among the gems are Whitney Balliett's splendid portrait of the underappreciated Dixieland clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, Ralph Ellison's memories of Minton's Playhouse in New York, the club where bop was born, and Gene Lees's narrative of a recording session with the ebullient, force-of-nature Dizzy Gillespie...
...Reading Jazz is simply no, compli-catedly wonderful...
...And more...
...The reviewer, enthusiastic to the point of illogic, blurted, "If there were no other book on jazz, this would be the one to have...
...Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five...
...Jazz lovers are famously partisan...
...The second section, "Reportage," is a compilation of sketches, profiles, and reminiscences about the music and the musicians, from the legendary King Oliver (Armstrong's patron and chief influence) through the years of the Big Bands to the formation of "modern" jazz (bop) in the forties and beyond...
...The third part of the book is "Criticism," and here Gottlieb's plan begins to reveal a central, though not a crucial, flaw...
...There has been so much good writing about jazz, by the players and the critics alike: probably because jazz, of all music, is a music that, if you love it, you love it beyond measure...
...No other book on jazz catches that magnificent obsession the way Reading Jazz does...
...When Ellington titled his autobiography Music Is My Mistress, he was being characteristically flamboyant: but he was not at all joking...
...And for those who do well, for those who do, it's simply a delight...
...Right...
...No important writer on the music is unrepresented here, regardless of their often violent disagreements with one another...
...There is no such thing, really, as a "jazz concert...
...I've learned, painfully over many years, that good writing is about 90 percent voice and 10 percent debris: find your voice and you're in like a burglar...
...or, now, "The Harry Connick Big Band...
...Gottlieb's book catches or incarnates that peculiar, unnamable aura...
...Only Jean-Paul Sartre, writing on the essence of jazz, seems to be a little behind the beat: but that itself, to us gallophobes, is oddly satisfactory...
...In a fifteen-table bar the ideal venue or in the Hollywood Bowl, a jazz performance, if it is a jazz performance, is less performance than intimate conversation: a seminar for thousands...
...It would be silly to list them all though I can't help tipping the hat to the brilliant Stanley Crouch, Gary Giddins, and Dan Morgenstern...
...The very first jazz recording, "Livery Stable Blues," by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was released in 1917 eighty years ago this year...
...Emerson would have gone bonkers about this as the truly American art...
...Anyone truly entranced by the music trust me, it's the only way to listen hears voices: the voices of the masters, Louis, Dizzy, Bird, Tatum, Zoot Sims, Mulligan...
...What emerges from this cacophony, as in New Orleans ensemble playing, is an ultimate harmony: all these great players lived in the music...
...But jazz forget the harmonic analyses and the learned comparisons to Baroque counterpoint and modal composition is voice, and voice, and voice alone...
...Symphonic ensembles are named for the cities that sponsor and maintain them: the Philadelphia, the Boston, the under Georg Solti all-but-unapproachable Chicago...
...Just what is the difference among autobiography, reportage, and criticism when the subject is jazz...
...The Miles Davis Quintet...
...a classical concert is a secular liturgy the essential flip side of carnival...
...Whitman, too...
...And how are jazz groups named...
...In this, as in so much else, the music is the defining American art, melding as we keep hoping America itself will absolute democracy and absolute, ferocious individuality...
...The "Autobiography" section is thirty-three reminiscences by some of the crucial figures in the saga: Louis Armstrong being his wonderful self, Duke Ellington being how could he not...
...The Benny Goodman Quartet...
...A rock or pop concert is a licensed revel and there's nothing wrong with that...
...From the valiant to the vile, they did burn with a fierce, sometimes steely passion...
...I mention that because my enthusiasm for Robert Gottlieb's Reading Jazz is, if anything, fiercer than that of the hapless Sun-Times reviewer: so, writing this, I am fighting heroically the urge to burble similarly...
...Gottlieb divides his collection into three equal sections, as his subtitle indicates...
...Gems, as I say, but in a tiara...
...I think not except, perhaps, in literature...
...And it's the passion the passion of and for the music that matters...
...florid and elegant, Miles Davis being a mean-spirited monster of ego, Art Pepper being chillingly frank about the ravages of heroin on his life and his music...
...Rock groups are named as concepts as marketing labels...
...Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara...
...Proper names...
...Not to know the music is not to be, in the fullest sense, American...
...Frank McConnell My all-time favorite Dumb Review Sentence is from the late fifties' Chicago Sun-Times, on Leonard Feather's important book, Inside Jazz...
...Is there an art where personality, life-story, and craft are so intimately intermixed as in this one...
...Known, respected, and played around the planet by now, it paradoxically retains the cachet of an insider's thing, a wry secret shared between the players and the crowd...
...It's enough to say that this is not only the best book about jazz I've seen, but the first really satisfactory anthology of jazz criticism, as essential and invigorating as the Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, but with the difference that this book was put together by just one guy...
...and, in second-line players, combinations of those voices...
...It's much more than that, though...
...So jazz autobiography, reportage, and criticism are basically apologies to Gottlieb the same thing: talk about something we love...
...Here is a music in which, at its best, individuality and popularity are indistinguishable, in which the pure job of the moment (jazz would not be jazz without recorded sound) is everything, and in which the single self both merges with and rises above the ensemble in which it plays...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 6
