Apprecation : Leonard Feather Built a Life on His Passion: Jazz

We are born with or we acquire passions as various as mountain-climbing or the collecting of porcelain, rare books or sports statistics. Leonard Feather’s passion was jazz. It touched him early, even before his teen years, and it never flagged or left him. When he died Thursday just a week or so after his 80th birthday, he was completing work on a revised and expanded edition of his “Encyclopedia of Jazz,” the standard reference in the field. It now becomes his monument and legacy, the centerpiece of his wide shelf of authoritative publications on the art form he loved.

I knew Leonard’s work before I knew him: from “Downbeat,” the magazine that I subscribed to at an early age, from liner notes he wrote and albums he produced; and soon after I joined The Times as entertainment editor in 1965, I asked him to become our jazz critic. He and his wife, Jane, and their daughter, Lorraine, had moved to Los Angeles from New York not long before.

For nearly 30 years he reviewed performances and festivals, profiled musicians and bands and wrote uniquely well-informed essays--pieces of history, really--on the state of jazz, which often seemed parlous as a commercial venture no matter how good the music was. Jazz clubs rise and fall (I can’t begin to imagine how many different smoky venues he attended over the decades), yet the invalid, like the stage, keeps recovering, as he reported.

We went to jazz events together from time to time, and occasionally I thought it miraculous for him to be so patient when assaulted by what sounded to me like the honkings of diseased geese, from which tempo and melody had been banned. But patience is what any critic most requires, right up there with a gift of words and a fund of background. Leonard had all three, and I marveled always at his ability to convey in words what the music had sounded like, and to make clear why it was good and important.

*

By definition all critics are meant to be disagreed with, and Leonard was no exception. Musical tastes tend to be passionate indeed, never more so than among the fans of traditional jazz and the Big Band sound. Leonard bowed to no one in his love of the shaping pioneers of jazz--Louie and Jellyroll, Bix and the Duke. But he admittedly had little time for the past recaptured; his musical gaze was forward, to the turf beyond “The Jazz Me Blues” and “In the Mood.”

What muted his critics, so far as they were muted, was the fact that he was a doer as well as a listener, a pianist-composer-arranger-conductor-producer who wrote the first jazz waltz the Ellington band recorded.

His ears were color-blind, to mix the senses, and he reviewed the playing, not the player’s race. But he also insisted that segregation had been a blot on the jazz escutcheon, and he admired the few bandleaders in the ‘30s and ‘40s who, like Artie Shaw, had defied Jim Crow and hired black sidemen. I admired not least Leonard’s courage in being able to criticize those he knew well. When at a certain moment he felt that George Shearing--whose sponsor he had been when Shearing emigrated from England--had strayed from jazz too far into a svelte commercialism, he said so, but the friendship endured.

The life of the jazz critic is not easy; it is a life without sinecures or much security, and for that reason among others the number of really able jazz critics is very small and always has been. Their number is now diminished by one, and one of the very best, as well as a friend whose loss I mourn.