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Great Books On Jazz
Great Books On Jazz
Date Posted: July 07 2009
Written By: Frank Portolese
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Great writers love jazz music. All creative people are fascinated by its combinations of discipline and freedom, decorum and abandon, sacred and profane. But writers especially are our musician’s first cousins, because music is language and language is music. Many authors have preserved the history, traditions and the journey of the American art form through the years. Scholarly figures such as Gunther Schuller and Andre Hodier brought an academic perspective to bear in celebration of this music. Less erudite but equally passionate fans like Robert Reisner heard the call and were inspired to create classics that preserve the past for later generations. Ralph J. Gleason (San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone co-founder) was an eloquent advocate, really one of the best, in the sixties newspaper and magazine trade. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Ted Joans blew poignant and often hilarious tributes to bebop. Some, like Nat Hentoff, who writes for the Washington Post, have been at it for years, and are a bridge from the past to today. Others are more recent additions to the scene. Many books on jazz start off as doctoral dissertations and get spun off as publications.
A word about historical literature: Jazz is 100-plus years old. Most people cannot agree over what happened yesterday, let alone in 1909, so truth about events described in written accounts is a fluid truth at best. It is good to understand something about sourcing. Reporters write about specific gigs, concerts, recording sessions or other relevant events within days of the time they happened, usually in newspapers or jazz magazines. Others, who were also present and experienced the music firsthand, write about it in books, soon after or perhaps decades later. When the author was “there” we attach a certain credibility to what he or she has to say whether deserved or not.
Other writers are not present at the times and places they describe. They rely on primary sources like government and other official records like birth, marriage and death announcements, recording and performance contracts, arrest records (sometimes written up by bigoted or crooked police or judges), and the like. Then there are secondary sources, like first-hand accounts, by relatives or witnesses who were present at an event or who knew the person in question. These sources are more subjective and their contributions range from credible to hearsay. There is usually much that is factual and accurate in such accounts. In these cases the truth is most closely divined by reading several books describing the same event or person and trusting only those facts that are in all accounts. But in history, hearsay and gossip have their place.
Consider Charlie Parker’s death. Kansas City birth records give his birth date as August 29, 1920. When he died in March of 1955 he was thirty-four. Dr. Robert Freymann, who treated him at the end, thought he was in his fifties, which was reported at the time. Trumpeter Harold Baker claims, “Naw, he was no thirty-four when he died. I was born May 26, 1913, and Charlie was older than me.” All this is in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert Reisner (Da Capo, 1962). Such a collection of contradictory statements shows the magnitude of interest in all things Parker at the time, whether factual, witnessed, anecdotal or pure gossip. How else do you portray the feeling of living in the same times as such people? There is no government record that can capture that.
One last point: consider that in 2009 you can’t help but know about President Obama. He seems to be all anyone talks about lately. We know his humor, his personality and his demeanor. Fifty years from now future generations will know the effects of his policies and actions however they turn out, thanks to public record, but they won’t know the man himself. As eyewitnesses and contemporaries die off, gossip and hearsay have a role and establish a historical tradition in itself.
JAZZ AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
First-person accounts are of interest for obvious reasons. Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday with William Dufty (Lancer Books) came out in 1956, shortly after her death. To have the words of the greatest jazz singer save Louis Armstrong as she describes her life, her job and her world is priceless. What a story! She remembers what she wants to remember the way she wants it told. What it is to be black and female in the first half of the twentieth century has rarely if ever been told so well. The tone is low simmer, and the water is at a rolling boil. There is a detachment and a resignation within the earthiness, and yet the story is vivid in the way a victim or a survivor speaks. The language must have been cleaned up for the vapid fifties, but it is far from sanitized, and it is galvanizing reading. This was made into a movie in the seventies starring Diana Ross, who was okay, but the screenplay was awful––forget it. This book is a serious slice from the great Lady Day.
Miles: the Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (Touchstone) is pretty well known, given its best-seller status when it was released in 1990. Outrageous in its language and its accusations, it clearly seals Miles’ reputation as a man who said what he wants without caring what anybody thinks. The stories are riveting, and to the extent you can believe them, undeniably you are getting the inside story of jazz in New York from 1944 through the eighties from the ultimate insider. It is at once combative, confessional, full of uncanny musical insight, and acknowledgement of fault and sin, and is completely essential. It must be also said that at any time the “B.S.” reading can go right off the scale.
Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper by Art and Laurie Pepper (Shirmer, 1979). I always hated this book. It is self-indulgent, self-pitying and as full of trash and tales of human decay as the worst pulp novel––unbearably dark. And yet the last few pages are among the most insightful passages about making jazz music in all the literature. He describes playing in a club with Sonny Stitt. Sonny plays first and he describes how it feels to hear Sonny playing all this great stuff and knowing he has to follow. It sounds like a boxing match, and Art is getting pummeled. Then it is time for Art to play and he describes the process. At first there is no process, only selfless listening and trying to make anything happen. Then he slowly gets his footing, doing only what feels honest while starting to connect with the band. Finally he lets it come from inside him. It really is unusually insightful. Buy the book, read the last six pages and then throw it out.
Other well known autobiographies include: Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz: the Autobiography of Teddy Wilson (Continuum, 2001), Music is My Mistress (Doubleday, 1973) by Duke Ellington, and Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (Da Capo, 1995).
These books are a reminder that while the recordings are permanent and enduring, the generations who were there while it was happening are not. The sounds will always be what matters. The stories and contexts that place them in perspective have fortunately been preserved thanks to the musicians, writers, poets and dramatists that were inspired by these same sounds. Those who best understand the traditions will be best equipped to carry them into the future.
To my knowledge all of the above mentioned books are available through bookstores, on Amazon in new or used versions, and at the various public libraries around the area. Next issue we will explore other jazz biographies and history books, and include some commentary by local jazz players.
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