You've Come a Long Way, Baby
COOK, BRUCE
You've Come a Long Way, Baby The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz Grove's Dictionaries of Music Edited by Barry Kernfeld Two volumes, 1,432 pp. $295.00 Reviewed by Bruce Cook Author, "The...
...He created relaxed, tuneful melodies centered in the middle register...
...Secondly, rock has happened...
...There is no particular prejudice against traditional jazz...
...There was the classical idiom, which included the innovative and unlistenable postWorld War II music in all its atonal and random guises that audiences hated, and then there was jazz—the product of junkie musicians who performed their improvisations, more often than not, on the chords of mundane popular songs...
...If it is, you can go to the library to settle any argument on anyone or practically anything to do with jazz, from Juhani Aaltonen to Bob Zurke...
...In fact, Miles Davis has never had a more than passable technique on the trumpet...
...Impressively, among the 250 or so other collaborators there are barely more than a handful of familiar names...
...I mention all this because Kernfeld, in addition to serving as editor of the project, is the most prolific contributor...
...Jazz is no longer the submusic, the musicofthemasses (although real jazz was never that), the stuff to be scorned by the high priests of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven...
...But without gaining much in complexity, or really changing very much in any other respect, jazz has achieved new dignity in the three decades since Pleasants spoke out...
...Its biographical section, for example, is a bit more frank than one might expect, making reference to his "irascible temperament" and giving a medical history of his later years that newspaper stories have tended to gloss over...
...His credentials are certainly in order...
...One might say it is essential for everyone interested in jazz, except for the price...
...If money is no object, this is the best you could buy on the subject...
...Bix Beiderbecke, Muggsy Spanier, the Brunies family, et al., are given plenty of respect and space...
...over 1,800 discographies...
...Just try to heft the two volumes, comprising nearly 1,400 oversized, double-column pages, and you will immediately sense that the enterprise must be taken seriously...
...Nobody will contest the size and breadth ofthework...
...The editor in charge of the vast production is one Barry Kernfeld...
...many, many of the shorter biographical entries on bop and post-bop musicians, and extended pieces on some of the musicians who were in the Miles Davis orbit during the years of his Sextet (including fairly long ones on John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly...
...thereal matter that remains to be considered is its quality...
...A fact sheet supplied with the review copies describes The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz quantitatively: over 4,500 articles...
...All in all then, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz is a remarkable achievement, as complete and authoritative as one would hope it to be...
...No, that's not amisprint in the box up at the top of this review: the two volumes really do cost $295...
...Most of these articles have been written by the very knowledgeable J. Bradford Robinson and Bill Russell...
...Jazzmen in Europe and Japan are given their due— and then some...
...over 3,000 entries on composers and performers...
...Pages and pages of short two- to fourinch entries on various musicians, record labels and musical terms manage convincingly, despite their brevity, to cover most aspects of jazz...
...The section on his music includes an example of his improvisation on "Summertime" presented in notation, and the following no-nonsense analysis of Miles' early music on the Charlie Parker recordings: "Davis rejected the standards set for jazz trumpeters in the 1940s by Dizzy Gillespie's bop improvisations, partly because of his limited technique (some of his early recordings were marred by errors), but principally because his interests lay elsewhere...
...He is not only a musicologist (PhD, Cornell University, 1981), but his thesis focused on jazz all the way—"a study of improvisation in the Miles Davis Sextet...
...over 220 illustrations...
...The article on Davis is excellent...
...First, a whole generation of classical musicians, composers, conductors, even a critic or two, has grown up listening to jazz and playing it, understanding and loving it for what it is...
...It is from the wonderful people who gave y ou the intimidatingly authoritative The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and in its own way the Dictionary of Jazz is probably as exhaustively complete...
...295.00 Reviewed by Bruce Cook Author, "The Beat Generation, " "Listen to the Blues" When, at the end of the '50s, Henry Pleasants declared in The Agony of Modern Music that jazz was the new music, the classical music of the future, nobody paid much attention to him...
...and so on...
...After days of trying to catch them out, I could not find any startling omissions...
...Those include Günther Schuller, André Hodeir (whose single appearance is a collaboration with Schuller on the firstrate article about Duke Ellington), James Lincoln Collier, Dan Morgenstern, Martin Williams, Paul Oliver (whose contribution to the Blues entry makes it the longest save one in the two volumes), and the ubiquitous Henry Pleasants...
...At the time this hearty music was born, the word "jazz" was a familiar low euphemism for sexual intercourse: it has come a long way since then...
...He has taught jazz history at a couple of colleges and began working full-time on the Dictionary of Jazz in 1984, except for a few breaks to play saxophone in and around Ithaca, New York...
...Although not every entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz is either as good or complete as Kernfeld' son Davis, it does set a standard for the work...
...Nothing has defined its present status quite so certainly, however, as the appearance of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz...
...The lines were clearly marked...
...He wrote a number of the longer articles on the technical aspects of jazz...
...And of course he assigned himself Miles Davis...
...Not reluctant to repeat ideas, he drew from such a small collection of melodic formulae that many solos seemed as much composed as improvised...
...his great art has been to create so skillfully within his limitations...
...The 71-page listing of jazz night clubs and venues all over the world from the turn of the century (in the case of New Orleans) to the present features a useful separate index...
...Plus tax...
...At least two factors help to explain the change...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 2
