Reading About Jazz

...He writes of jazz: "I do not see how you can deny it the prerogatives of any living organism...

...Berendt talks of a quality in jazz that translates as "vitalization of vitality," and he sees jazz as symbolizing a spirit of "togetherness...

...Every now and then he gushes, as in a record-liner note about the integrity of Charlie Mingus that he reprints, or gets carried away, as when he sees Monk's feet at the piano "slash into space like the climax of a switch-blade duel...

...After his death, Parker's second wife asked the estate for his alto saxophone, explaining: "When I married him, all he had was a horn and a habit...

...Parker seems to have been a remarkable man, a musical genius of great intellectual powers, gnawing schizophrenia, and appetites so Gargantuan that four different women, three bottles of whisky and quite a lot of heroin in one day could not satisfy them...

...His earlier book on jazz, Hodeir writes, "required a Cartesian skepticism...

...It is informed and honest about such major matters as the nasty working conditions of jazz musicians, narcotics, and race prejudice (some of it by Negro musicians against white musicians), and fascinating on such lesser matters as the Negro "put on" of square whites, and the "band chicks" or camp followers of jazz...

...The idea that the arts get better and better, as the sciences do, is a fallacy that literature outgrew a long while back...

...The last of these books is Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, by Robert George Reisner [see also "Bird Watching" by Albert Goldman, NL, November 26, 1962...

...As I recall, one was all about the gamy origins of the art in New Orleans "cathouses," another dismissed everything but New Orleans jazz and identified that as a devout Christian music in praise of God, and a third was full of short stories in which one unappreciated genius after another blew his beautiful soul out the mouth of his hom while his body wasted away...

...Originally a doctoral dissertation, it is a study of the public shift in attitude toward jazz, from violent condemnation to a considerable acceptance, in the period between the World Wars...

...I liked only a small amount of what I heard, although I would probably like more of it on further hearing...

...Hentoff's interest is primarily anthropological, and he describes his book as "an attempt at socio-economic description of the backgrounds of the music and its players...

...The two of them are probably the best American jazz critics, and in jazz circles they are considered formidable intellectuals...

...The most unpleasant feature of this evolutionism is Hodeir's brutal dismissal of older musicians as "entertainers" or "clowns...

...Ultimately Parker takes on tragic stature and seems a kind of Captain Ahab, a mad will driving a mad vessel to a foreordained doom...

...More serious than these absurdities is Berendt's assumption of teleological progress or evolution in jazz...

...and the books were awful...

...A few of the reminiscences in Bird curdle the blood...

...His evolution too is teleological, although its appointed end is the pianist Thelonius Monk, who in 1954 produced "the first formally perfect solo in the history of jazz...

...The one nearest to it is The New Jazz Book by Joachim Berendt, translated by Dan Morganstern (Hill and Wang, 314 pp., photographs, $2.45), an indiscriminate handbook that sold a quarter of a million copies in Europe...

...a gospel singer is "Victorian-shaped...

...Coleman Hawkins' "heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats of a big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet and lit by huge fires...

...Nevertheless Leonard's book is a good and useful one, and he sometimes turns a nice phrase, as in a characterization of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" as "Liszt, as it were, in blackface...

...Balliett writes impressionist criticism, trying to convey jazz sounds in verbal images...

...Red Allen has "a deceptively sad basset-hound face...

...Monk plays the piano "as if he were catching trout with his bare hands...

...He quotes from Winckelmann's definition of classicism to describe Count Basie's band, and he identifies Bix Beiderbeckc as a German romantic poet like Novalis...

...Some jazz critics have outgrown the notion, but not Berendt...

...In his hatred and open defiance of the white world (Parker once defecated in the telephone booth of the night club where he worked), he is somewhat reminiscent of Jack Johnson...

...It led Dryden to excuse Chaucer's verse because "he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first," and Johnson to patronize Shakespeare's "uniform simplicity of primitive qualities...

...Most of Bird consists of interviews with people who knew him...

...He had the oldest looking face I ever saw," one friend recalls...

...Hodeir claims that he had a chance to become "the authorized spokesman" of American jazz musicians in 1957, but it would have required narcotic addiction and giving up his "cultural background," so that he "could not and would not take that irreversible plunge...

...In its focus on personality rather than the music, it reminds me of Ramsey and Smith's Jazzmen, the bible of my youth...

...I made this same nostalgic revisit some years ago...

...a Joe Jones drum roll is "smooth as hot fudge being poured over marble...

...WRITERS & WRITING Reading About Jazz By Stanley Edgar Hyman Some perverse impulse leads me periodically to take a look at what has become of jazz, which was enormously important to me as a college undergraduate in the late '30s (although I was then, as 1 am now...

...He sees "stylistic development" as a teleological "evolution" that "leads in a straight line" to alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, "the last phase of this evolution...

...Berendt's book is full of desperate lists of names, since "if one fails to keep pace with the new names that constantly emerge, one loses perspective...

...But Hentoff really does know jazz history (as Hodeir, for example, does not and never will), and he shares with Balliett an enthusiasm for the blues and for good jazz of all periods...

...Neil Leonard's Jazz and the White Americans (University of Chicago, 215 pp., $4.50) is a work of scholarship...

...Parker, dead at 35, is prominent in the long list of jazz martyrs—Bix Beiderbecke dying of tuberculosis at 28, Charlie Green freezing to death in a doorway, Bessie Smith bleeding to death in Mississippi, Joe Oliver in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn, Tommy Ladnier starving to death at the height of his fame, Clifford Brown cut off in his prime, Billie Holiday dying in a hospital room full of narcotics squad detectives—and is the only one of them whose cult shows no sign of diminishing...

...Whitney Balliett's Dinosaurs in the Morning (Lippincott, 224 pp., $3.95) is a collection of New Yorker pieces, some of them indistinguishable from prose poems...

...How pleasant to learn that a report by the Illinois Vigilance Association found "that in 1921-22 jazz had caused the downfall of 1,000 girls in Chicago alone...

...Berendt's book is "Germanic" in all the bad senses of that word...

...Balliett is sometimes a little soft and runny (to try an image of my own), a quality he shares with Nat Hentoff, author of a collection of essays, The Jazz Life (Apollo Editions, 255 pp., $1.65...

...Leonard's content analysis of jazz lyrics, complete with tables, suffers from his tendency to miss their ironies and double meanings, and he mistakes Billie Holiday's torpedoing of popular song lyrics, in which she machine-guns the survivors, for sentimentality...

...Hodeir has fallen for the evolutionary analogy even more fully than Berendt...

...Balliett has basic good sense, though, and it is a joy to read him on "evolution": "It is silly to argue that art progresses": the jazz press "tends to confuse newness with progress and progress with quality...

...The physical appearance of musicians is rendered similarly...

...And what is "Victorian-shaped...

...I hope it is a misprint for "Victoria-shaped...

...Incidentally, Hodeir's ultimate, Monk, has said of Berendt's ultimate, Coleman: "He's just playing loud all the time and slurring his notes...

...His whole body was filled with a terrible cold," says another...

...Chu Berry wears the expression of a man peering through a Venetian blind...

...This is fine if you have seen a snowy egret flashing out of the mire, but not much help if you haven't...

...As Berendt is comically German, so Hodeir embodies all in the French intellectual tradition that most repels...

...In its blend of mockery and bleak melancholy, so like a blues, that remark of Géraldine Parker's probably told me more about jazz than all the books I read...

...Beiderbecke solos come "flashing out of the mire like a snowy egret...

...Balliett can be terribly arch, as when he says that a jazz solo in the Museum of Modern Art garden "made the statues themselves glance up in surprise," and he is probably the only jazz critic who would call a melodic line "nutant" (it means "drooping," as I know from looking it up...

...He is provincial, narrow, arrogant and pretentious...

...None of the recent books I read is as egregious as those...

...In respect to talking concretely about the music, the jazz criticism I read is enormously better than any I remember...

...He knows a great deal about music, but he is too mean-spirited to be a critic...

...André Hodeir's Toward Jazz, translated by Noel Burch (Grove Press, 224 pp., $4.75), is a book of essays by a French critic and musicologist...

...Jones' physique "resembles a tightly-packed cigar...

...Sometimes Hentoff goes beyond the socio-economic, and at those times he can be quite profound about the experience of playing and hearing the music...

...a musical illiterate...

...this one demands of him only "the visionary outlook of a Nietzsche...

...Berendt told an interviewer that his first work on the subject, Das Jazzbuch, was in comparison with this "very German," so that there must be degrees of the Teutonic beyond my imagining...

...Some of Leonard's material is wonderfully funny...

...He gave me the habit, so I might as well have the horn...

...I have been listening to records of modern jazz, and have gone through half a dozen recent books on the subject...

...The style of one unfortunate tenor saxophonist, by way of keeping perspective, is identified as "Coltraneized Lucky Thompson...