Coloring the Music
Kostelanetz, Richard
Coloring the Music Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz Too many books about Negro Ameri-¦¦¦ can music have suffered from a paucity of insight. Some books gossip about the performers and their lives,...
...A final, considerable virtue is that Williams forgets that most of his jazzmen are Negroes, and within the world of music this is the way it should be...
...His book, "F...
...Nonetheless, Urban Blues is valuable, both as reportage on the ways of contemporary urban blues singers largely unknown to the white community (the section on B. B. King is especially interesting) and as a diffuse introduction to the variety of questions that scholars ought to be asking of Negro music...
...My only complaint in this respect is that he underestimates, I believe, the ability of a young audience to assimilate more complicated technical matter...
...Keil's appendix, "Talking About Music," is remarkably suggestive, if not better than the body of the book...
...Where's the Melody?, however, is more an introductory work, especially for people who have meager musical literacy...
...and his fingerwork, Williams continually offers technical explanations where his inferiors offer aimless prose...
...The prime virtues of the two books reviewed here is that they transcend these tendencies and deal intelligently with substantial problems...
...teaches American history at Harpur College...
...Some books gossip about the performers and their lives, at the expense of discussing their contributions to musical art...
...Keil's major problem is that instead of working out from his insights into the music, he approaches the blues with many sociological generalizations, which more than once prompt him to misinterpret the lyrics he quotes...
...and Keil is inclined to record all his ideas rather than to separate the better from the worse...
...Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon," will be published this spring by Oxford University Press...
...but I for one would have used their rich ideas differently...
...ROBERT SKLAR is an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...He is writing a book on the politics of social welfare...
...His essays on individual jazzmen, which have long appeared in Evergreen Review, are among the best of their kind...
...Indeed, this ability to provide true criticism probably reflects his extensive training in English literature...
...But in this, his first book, he manages his multiple intention so clumsily that his argument gets lost in all his shifts and parries...
...A. B. ROLLINS JR...
...Martin Williams has long struck me as the most profound of the regular jazz critics, for he attempts to penetrate and dissect the mysteries of musical excellence and stylistic difference...
...HOWARD A. PALLEY is an associate professor in the school of social work at Adelphi University...
...RICHARD KOSTELANETZ is the editor of two books of criticism: "The New American Arts" and "On Contemporary Literature...
...ALLEN GUTTMAN teaches English literature at Amherst and is the author of "The Wound in the Heart...
...Knowing that these artistic matters have less to do with the quality of a man's soul than his musical competence THE REVIEWERS JAMES NELSON GOODSELL is Latin American correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor...
...others exploit the music to corroborate a racist theme...
...Williams explains all the basic technical phenomena in prose that is neatly constructed and simply presented...
...He won the Sigma Delta Chi award in 1965 for his coverage of the revolution in the Dominican Republic...
...Keil intends to talk about many things at once—the music, the culture that produced it, the roles of the urban blues singer within that culture, the relationship of Negro culture to the American mainstream, and so on...
...RE ID BEDDOW is a free lance writer...
...Charles Keil's Urban Blues is a knottier, and nuttier, study, more ambitious in purpose...
...Finally, as a personal matter, I notice sympathetically that Keil has assimilated many of the thinkers who seem to have influenced enormously my own generation (in the late twenties)—Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan...
...Urban Blues is full of both good ideas and bad guesses, presented in a prose that oddly combines polemical fervor and academic circumspection...
...In addition to providing capsule notes on various major performers, he makes suggestions on purchasing books and records...
...they may well remember more of their childhood music lessons than the musically forgetful adult...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
