A Blueprint For Jazz Writing - Two Views from Two Authors
A Blueprint For Jazz Writing - Two Views from Two Authors
 Eugene Holley, Jr.
The only thing more precarious and precious than the state of jazz in the United States is the state of jazz writing: criticism, reportage, biographies, musical analysis, recording and concert reviews, and so on. The worst writers use their platform to insult musicians, and condescend to their readers. The best writers inform, illuminate, and educate their readership, far beyond the publications dates of their pieces. ...Here are two magnificent examples of the latter kind of jazz writing...
For over 50 years, Dan Morgenstern has been the closest thing to a patron saint of jazz. He currently heads the invaluable Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University's Newark campus, worked as an advisor on Ken Burns Jazz, served as editor for Down Beat and Jazz magazines in the '60s. He penned dozens of liner notes and produced an equal number of recordings and authored a pictorial book, Jazz People. His latest book, Living with Jazz: A Reader edited by Sheldon Meyer (Pantheon), is a long-overdue reader of his best observations, and insights of the music, along with some illuminating portraits of musicians.
For the German-born Morgenstern, jazz was not an excuse for Negro slumming. Force to flee his homeland in World War II to Sweden, Denmark, and then to the United States in the late '40s, jazz was the sound of liberation. "To those who hated the Nazis," he wrote, "jazz stood for freedom ... for democracy, for the spirit of America." For the young Morgenstern, Louis Armstrong personified the democratic character of our nation. Only Duke Ellington is closest to Armstrong's Olympian position in Morgenstern's rank.
With the exception of the great Albert Murray, Morgenstern not only witnessed the rise of jazz from swing, bebop, and hard-bop to the so-called "cool school," and the avant-garde. He, along with Martin Williams, Barry Ulanov and Leonard Feather are arguably the "founding fathers" of jazz criticism. Indeed, all throughout Living with Jazz, Morgenstern's prose rings with an all seeing eye that doesn't burn the reader with glib cliches. Whether he's writing about a Bill Evans concert, or waxing philosophic on Fats Waller, Don Byas, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell or Cecil Taylor, Morgenstern writes with a passion for the music and the musicians, and with a patience that comes from seeing jazz from the ground up.
 Though he claims Martin Williams as a critical ancestor, the Manhattan-based Gary Giddins, author of Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century (Oxford), is closer to Morgenstern is his critical temper. Like Mr. Morgenstern, Louis Armstrong also seduced Giddins into the world of jazz -- not the horrors of a world war -- but in the suburbs of Long Island where Giddins grew up in the '50s and 60s. His first hearing of an Armstrong rendition of "Basin Street Blues was his "eureka" moment. "After the final trumpet solo, which builds in spiritual increments," he writes, "I was at the turntable before the next track began, and played it again, standing there, and then a third time, after which I lifted the platter and noticed a wet spot, a drop of water on the vinyl, and I realized I was crying."
Like Morgenstern, Giddins was also featured in Ken Burns Jazz. He's also the author of eight books, including Bing Crosby: a Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940, Satchmo, and Celebrating Bird, along with three documentaries and a host of critical awards. Unlike Morgenstern, the era covered in Giddins' collection -- from the early '90s - to now, is a tougher period to chronicle, thanks to pop music, the passing of jazz's elite musicians, the rise and fall of the Young Lions, the fickle attentions of major record labels, and the rise of recording technology.
From Wynton Marsalis's editor-challenged Blood on the Fields, David Murray's post-Coltrane saxophone, John Lewis' fugal pianisms, to his dead-on assessments of the JVC Jazz Festivals, Giddins' talent lies in the way he zeros in on the personal and artistic pros and cons of a given subject, while weaving in autobiographical revelations and references to literary figures like William James. Who else could write a review of Mosaic's Atlantic New Orleans Sessions with a travelogue detailing the horrors of the segregated south? Giddins is able to do that because he understands something a lot of people writing about the music don't understand: Jazz criticism (as he once wrote) is a function of literature. Or to put it bluntly, a pen (or a computer keyboard) in hand is not the same as playing an instrument. The only sad thing about the publication of this reader is that it marks the ending of Giddins' spectacular, 30 year Weather Bird column, where most of these essays appeared, in the Village Voice.
Since its birth there always been talk about "the death of jazz." In many parallel conversations there's also been talk about the death of jazz criticism. These exemplary anthologies are excellent refutations to those old predictions. If you want to understand this music, these two books offer all you need to get on the syncopated superhighways of America's music.
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