THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
By Ted Gioia
Oxford University Press, 471 pages, $30
MONK
By Laurent de Wilde
Marlove, 214 pages, $22.95
SWINGIN’ THE DREAM
Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture
By Lewis A. Brenberg
University of Chicago Press, 293 pages, $28
Miles Davis once told an interviewer, “I’ll give you the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.”
In “The History of Jazz,” Ted Gioia, a musician, writer and historian, takes 200,000 words to spin the rest of the story, from its roots in Africa, black blues and ragtime music to the complex, atonal improvisations at New York’s Knitting Factory club today. It is a story of places: New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, Kansas City, Los Angeles and back to New York. It is a story of small combos and big bands playing myriad styles: traditional, swing, bebop, cool, hard-bop, third-stream, free and back to bebop. Most of all it’s the story of the players: Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Parker, Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and scores more.
Jazz, the black American art, adored abroad and underappreciated at home. Like cinema, an art of our century. The ephemeral art that created a lifestyle. The improvisational art that ultimately touched all the fine arts of our time. Here it is, complete and up to date in a single volume-a spectacular achievement, sorely needed as the art’s first century comes to a close. (We’ve been waiting a decade for the third volume of Gunther Schuller’s monumental, innovative history to take us past 1945!)
“The History of Jazz” fundamentally offers the received wisdom of mainline jazz critics and musicians. There is little in the line of revaluation or significant new insights as offered by Schuller, though Gioia does some splendid exegeses on the masters. He is at his best on the crucial 1945-60 period: Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Monk, Davis, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Dolphy and Coleman. Unlike Schuller, however, he does not reproduce a single bar of music, apparently writing for the layman; yet he salts the narrative with highly technical musical terms that go unexplained.
Gioia’s analyses can be detailed and precise. He deftly pinpoints the truly progressive works of Wynton Marsalis before the celebrated trumpeter-composer regressed into neoclassicism. But too often he simply dubs a work or artist as brilliant or important without amplification. For example, he correctly calls Ellington’s “Braggin’ in Brass” a “masterpiece,” “stunning” and “breathtaking” without actually describing its astonishing hocket technique, in which each of three trombonists plays every third successive note in a complex musical line, giving the startling effect of a single player soloing at breakneck speed.
This kind of history is perforce derivative, drawing on every conceivable reference source. This means Gioia can recycle misinformation, such as identifying Ralph Burns’ composition “Early Autumn” as the fourth movement of his “Summer Sequence” suite. “Summer Sequence Part IV” actually is a different work, recorded by Woody Herman’s band a year before “Early Autumn.”
Gioia is commendably inclusive, discussing schools, trends and musicians that too many other critics ignore or dismiss as not in the true jazz tradition. But in doing so he devotes excess space to popular but minor figures, such as Eddie Condon and George Shearing, while bypassing the contributions of talents such as saxophonist Bud Freeman and pianist Andrew Hill. He notes only the names of trumpeter-composer Tom Harrell and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett (without even identifying Garrett’s instrument) and completely overlooks the remarkable tenor saxophonist David Sanchez–yet they are arguably today’s leading figures on their respective horns.
He also has an annoying need to pigeonhole–sometimes questionably. He rigidly categorizes certain players as “cool” or “hard bop,” then goes on to adopt literary, catch-all categories such as “postmodern” and “deconstructionist” to describe many post-1970s players. Grab-bag terminologies, however literary or chic, can blur distinctions instead of make them. By Gioia’s overly broad definitions, pianist-composer Monk might be considered a postmodernist because he sometimes incorporated the older stride-piano style; his famed solo on Davis’ “The Man I Love” or his riff on “Carolina Moon” would make him a deconstructionist.
Monk himself is the subject of a fascinating new biography by American-born French pianist Laurent de Wilde–a loving, analytical, philosophical and very French rant on the life and music of one of the most influential figures in the history of jazz. Far from your standard jazz-bio chronology of recordings and gigs interspersed with anecdotes, the slim volume “Monk” loops and circles and roars about every aspect of the subject, from his technique to the shape of his ears. At the same time, it offers a wealth of insights into the quirky, distinctive music of this modern master–who sadly descended into autistic madness in his last decade–and why his reputation continues to grow long after his death.
Gioia’s work in part places the evolution of jazz styles into sociohistoric context–particularly that of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where jazz was being born, and the civil-rights/black-power era of the ’60s, when free jazz emerged. Another new book, the forthcoming “Swingin’ the Dream,” by Lewis Erenberg, a cultural historian at Loyola University of Chicago, is devoted to America in the Big Band swing era, that special age when jazz was both the art music and the popular music of its time.
Erenberg, a knowledgeable jazz fan, recounts the familiar story of how Benny Goodman’s band surged to popularity, how swing became a national obsession and how the black bands that started it all were eventually cut into a share of the glory–but only a share. The story is carried beyond the war years, through the decline of the big bands and the rise of bebop, an introverted art music that virtually prided itself on its alienation from the masses.
The story is told from the viewpoint of the audience, the society itself, and it thus becomes a saga of race in the America of the 1930s as played out in the music business. Though Erenberg is somewhat repetitive and academic, there is much rich material here, notably in the relationship between the music and the political Left. He also recounts the cruel racism that marred the lives of black musicians, as when the great singer Billie Holiday, while working a hotel ballroom with Artie Shaw’s band, could not stay at the hotel and was forced to use the service elevators.
As the music stands on the brink of its second century, two large issues emerge, both questions touched upon briefly by Gioia. First, will there ever be another towering leader in the mold of Parker, Ellington or Armstrong, who reshapes and changes all of jazz music in his lifetime and beyond? The last such overwhelming figure was Coltrane, who died in 1967 and has never been succeeded.
The even larger question relates to the first, and is faced by all the arts today: Does the concept of modernism, of “progress” in art history, still have meaning? A clear line of progress, of continuous modernization, can be traced from Armstrong through Parker, then to Coleman and Coltrane–but then what? In Coleman’s “Free Jazz” and Coltrane’s “Ascension,” both from the 1960s, we have jazz equivalents of “Finnegan’s Wake,” the ultimate masterworks of modernism. Now, having acknowledged them, do they represent a direction or a dead end? Joyce’s final testament gave rise to no new school of literature; free jazz continues as a living music today, but we have not gone “beyond” it, other than to incorporate and adapt its elements into a melding of modern styles. On the other hand, ignoring the tomfoolery of “postmodernism” in architecture, Frank Gehry has shown us there is a truly progressive next step after Mies.
The great critic Whitney Balliett called jazz the “sound of surprise.” What sound will be our next surprise?
