From Satchmo to Bird

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 1, 1999 | by Clive Davis

Noted music critic Gary Giddins reviews 100 years of American jazz by profiling more than 80 artists, from the great Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and beyond.

Like some grand Hollywood actress of the old school, jazz always has been hazy about its precise date of birth. How fitting that its foremost exponent, Louis Armstrong, used to tell the world that he was born on July 4, 1900 -- the perfect choice for a pioneer of what has been called America's greatest indigenous art form.

A few skeptics, of course, would question that assertion. Caught somewhere between classical music and pop, regarded as the product of an illicit union between ragtime and blues, jazz has had its pedigree called into question from the start. Today, as jazz advances deeper and deeper into the academy, and as Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall compete to mount the best repertory programs, commentators wonder whether an indefinable spark has been lost in the genre's long journey from the bars and dance halls of the turn of the century.

Gary Giddins, whose column in the Village Voice has been essential reading for more than two decades, shares some of those doubts in his forceful collection of profiles of major jazz figures, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (Oxford University Press, 690 pp). As he writes in his introduction, jazz classicism that can keep alive the music of Ellington and Basie and Lunceford and Gil Evans, yet fails to coexist with the most vital of jazz traditions -- its inventiveness, irreverence and canny involvement with other music and life as we live it -- will produce a dozen lively busts for home or school and a gorgeously ornate headstone."

The author remains without doubt that there are plenty of creative musicians at work. One of Giddins' assets is his tireless advocacy of performers such as Randy Weston and Tommy Flanagan, two pianists normally overlooked in the media rush for photogenic youth and glossy fashion-supplement portraits. But he takes issue, as well, with the oft-repeated claim that the 1990s have produced a new golden age. By comparing the list of today's prominent names with the roster of legends still active in 1960, he reminds us that we are living in straitened times.

Visions of Jazz is not the book to turn to in search of colorful anecdotes. Unlike the New Yorker's elegant critic Whitney Balliett -- whose profiles have been collated in Oxford University pressbooks such as American Musicians -- Giddins is not particularly interested in the quotidian details of a musician's life away from the bandstand or on the road. Readers looking for the broad humor that is a staple of the older players' professional lives had best turn to another Oxford author, bass player Bill Crow, whose Jazz Anecdotes provides a genial potpourri of jazz lore and after-hours stories.

As a musical commentator, though, Giddins is hard to beat. His twin chapters on Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, for instance, show him at his best, balancing enthusiasm with a cool, analytical eye. Taking his cue from the distinguished opera critic Henry Pleasants (author of the landmark study The Great American Popular Singers), he can discuss the differences between classical and popular vocal registers with a precise, dispassionate eye. His interests extend beyond the confines of pure jazz. W.C. Handy receives a respectful chapter, as do Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Waters gets the attention she deserves.

But there are surprising exceptions too, a reminder that this is, at root, a subjective collection of essays rather than the neutral foundation course hinted at in the book's subtitle. Neither Wynton Marsalis nor Dave Brubeck merit their own entry. Both men are dismissed in the introduction as "popularizers," a phrase which does scant justice to their contribution as composers and catalysts. Not to find space for either of them -- or for the controversial but undeniably influential Keith Jarrett -- seems almost perverse.

Nor, as Giddins candidly admits, will readers find much about European artists, from the gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt to the modern British composer and band leader Mike Westbrook. Nothing either about South Africa's Abdullah Ibrahim or the best-selling Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek. America may have been the cradle of jazz, but much of the most inspiring and individual music today comes from far beyond Manhattan.

New album releases or historical reissues form the kernel of many of the chapters. Readers can be forgiven for feeling frustrated that their own collections are not as comprehensive as Giddins' while he skips from one comparison to the next. The Blue Note label helpfully has issued a companion CD compilation that will help the general listener to find his or her bearings amid the waves and eddies of jazz history.

The author's phenomenal appetite for the sound of the new will give all but the most blinkered reactionary an appetite for the unknown. But above all, the overwhelming strength of this book is that it also makes you want to listen afresh to music that you thought you knew well.