THE HISTORY OF JAZZ:<i> By Ted...

In the fall of 1982, on the advice of “Ragtime” Bob Darch, I took my violin and a gypsy cab out to Bedford-Stuyvesant with a guitar player and a singer to play a few tunes for Eubie Blake. The old master composer and piano player was housebound in pajamas and robe but still very much compos mentis. All afternoon he hummed along to choruses of “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Memories of You.” But at the end of every piece, he’d mumble a one-word curse: “Mozart . . . Mozart!” After six or seven tunes, I finally turned to Eubie and asked him what he had against the composer. “Mozart,” he said. “Why are they playing all that Mozart? He’s dead!”

A few months after our visit, Eubie turned 100 and was serenaded by dozens of jazz musicians in a 24-hour tribute at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan. Five days later, he strode off himself to meet Wolfgang. The next year, “Amadeus” won the Academy Award, and recordings of “Don Giovanni” flew out of the stores. But though from time to time, if you wander down, say, to the Tom Turpin Ragtime Festival in Savannah, Ga., you might hear a chorus of “The Charleston Rag,” you aren’t likely to run into a tune by Eubie Blake in any jazz club in Manhattan. And rightly so. After all, he’s dead.

Classical music has never been shy about performing the symphonies of its angels, but jazz, the hell-raising music of the here and now, the music whose name (according to many) comes from the Life Force itself, has always shunned the past. Death is something to be blown away by the woodwinds, not wallowed in by the brass. It’s “The Saints Go Marching In” versus Liszt’s “Funeral March.”

So what to make of the spate of articles and books in the last few years that say jazz has turned its back on the living? That jazz has come not to bury its dead but to praise them? That jazz has become the province of museums like Lincoln Center or the Smithsonian? That jazz has not just been framed but murdered? To judge from the recent crop of jazz criticism, the body has been misidentified. The real corpse may not be jazz but jazz criticism.

Take “The History of Jazz” by Ted Gioia. Touted as the first concise jazz history in the 40 years since the publication of Marshall W. Stearns’ “The Story of Jazz,” Gioia’s book is the latest in a venerable line of jazz volumes edited by Stanley Meyer for Oxford University Press. The best of Meyer’s books, like Whitney Balliett’s “American Musicians,” have mixed a depth of knowledge with a quick-fingered style that has made reading a joy not unlike finding an empty stool at the far end of the bar at Bradley’s, with Cyrus Chestnut at the piano. What a disappointment, therefore, to wade through Gioia’s history, which, while it points to the proper signposts, submerges them under a lake of tepid prose and library paste.

We know we’re in trouble when the first chapter, already encumbered with the Stone Age title “The Prehistory of Jazz,” begins the search for the mixed European and African ancestry of jazz by traveling with the 7th century Moors in their invasion of Spain and southern France. If not for Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Tours, Gioia tells us, quoting Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” “the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.” It’s a novel argument (and how many of us want to hear about clanking chains in slave boats again?), but Gioia is surely shooting himself in his own footnote with a passage that would make a better introduction to a Monty Python sketch.

And this is only the beginning. Throughout the book, academic tics jump off the page. Nietzsche turns up in a discussion of the Modern Jazz Quartet; Herbert Marcuse, in a riff on Albert Ayler. In a passage analyzing the fragmentary nature of Charles Mingus’ method of composition, Gioia invokes the shades of Gibbon’s sidemen, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: “ ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ Eliot proclaims toward the end of the ‘The Waste Land.’ ‘I cannot make it cohere,’ announces Ezra Pound near the conclusion of his massive ‘Cantos.’ In fact, Mingus was the closest jazz has come to having its own Ezra Pound,” Gioia writes. Why? Because Mingus fragmented his way into Bellevue (although not for broadcasting propaganda for Mussolini).

It’s not so much that Gioia misunderstands Mingus but that his invocations of these literary and philosophical sources add nothing to our understanding of jazz. They are merely examples of a nervous school of pop criticism that believes that scholarly references confer legitimacy, that Charlie Parker’s greatness lay in his ability to quote Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” from the “Peer Gynt Suite,” rather than in the seamless virtuosity of his playing. They prove merely that the writer has spent time in the library.

Ultimately this is the problem with Gioia’s “History.” Except for testimony in the final few pages, no reader would ever suspect that Gioia has heard jazz live in a concert hall or a club. He has listened to records, thousands of them. His list of “Recommended Listening” at the back of the book is a concise set of idiosyncratic suggestions that certainly gives a feeling for the range of jazz over the century. And he has read books and reviews and articles on jazz (his bibliography and his footnotes point the way toward an excellent library of jazz, a library filled with the firsthand accounts of excellent writers like Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather and Mingus himself). Reading Gioia, in fact, evokes the overwhelming image of a scholar sitting in a library with a big pair of Sennheisers over his ears. There’s none of the smoke and fatigue, none of the late-night excitement of years of sitting and soaking in clubs.

Other writers, like Gunther Schuller, have treated jazz composition as the proper object of intellectual analysis. The problem with Gioia’s approach, however, is that it treats the history of the music as frozen performances on vinyl. He gives little indication that jazz is a musical form that depends so heavily on the inspiration of the moment, on the danger of improvisation, on the here and now. For years, jazz musicians learned to improvise on the bandstand, mentored by legends or old-timers an eardrum away. In recent years, though, with popular music embracing rock, funk, punk and rap, the audience, and therefore the platform, for jazz has dwindled.

Nowadays, the only way for many alto sax players to practice Charlie Parker’s four-bar break into his solo in Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” is to wander down to the library and check out the live recording from the 1947 Carnegie Hall concert. Without the opportunity for creation, for developing their own improvisations, they have been driven into mere imitation, confusing the genius of the specific solo with the genius of the spirit that could improvise such a solo on the spot. While I am sure that Gioia is aware that jazz is charged by the unpredictability of a live performance, the disquieting undertone of his “History” is that what is essential about jazz can be learned from listening to records and reading books.

The reason for reading any history, even Gibbon’s, is what it can teach us about the present. And that present, according to two new books from St. Martin’s Press (the other jazz giant among publishers), is Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis, for those who gave up on jazz when Ronald Reagan became president, is the trumpet virtuoso who has fused his mastery of jazz and classical music into a renaissance of classical jazz and a stupendous recording contract with Sony. The Marsalis thesis--and it is a thoughtful thesis, formulated by both the trumpeter and the critic Stanley Crouch with a major debt to Albert Murray, the invisible man of jazz criticism--is that jazz took a wrong turn in the ‘60s when it threw all its energy into individual expression. The free jazz movement, they argue, the experiments of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the fusion of Tony Williams’ Lifetime and Weather Report, the perilous flights of Albert Ayler and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, ran their infertile course and jazzed themselves dry. What is needed, they say, is a return to roots.

Tom Piazza makes the case for Marsalis, the centerpiece of his “Blues Up and Down,” a collection of essays dating from 1979 to the present. In the essay, “Portrait of Wynton Marsalis,” Piazza records a road trip he made with the musician and his band in 1989. He follows Marsalis off the bus and into the sound check, from the stage and into the dressing room, where Marsalis delivers impromptu master classes to starry-eyed blowers. And at every stop, Piazza takes notes while Marsalis preaches his gospel. “There’s no way somebody studying European classical music would skip over Bach,” Marsalis tells a high school band in Kansas City, Mo. “Duke Ellington is the Bach of American music. You can’t hope to carry on an art form if you haven’t addressed the classic statements that have been made in that form.” Whether one agrees with Marsalis or not, there is something wonderful about Piazza’s portrait of the young artist as a latter-day Leonard Bernstein for a generation too young and culturally removed to remember the Young People’s Concerts at Lincoln Center. You get the feeling that sitting in on one 2 1/2-hour session with Marsalis and a high school band is a history lesson worth a week in a library.

Still, the question that Professor Marsalis begs is, what does it mean to “carry on an art form”? Presumably, he is training these young musicians to perform Ellington the way he might train them to perform Bach. But what does that mean? To learn how to play like the Duke? He’s dead!

Like Gioia, Piazza and Marsalis are missing a crucial distinction between classical music and their “art form” of choice. Jazz performers must learn two art forms, performance and composition, and then learn how to fuse them into one. It is this latter function, the jazz musician as creator and not just interpreter, that drives Eric Nisenson’s “Blue: The Murder of Jazz.” “Playing music that has been thoroughly explored decades in the past is like rediscovering New Jersey,” he writes. In fact, he continues, the very geniuses whose music Marsalis and his pride of Young Lions are exploring, the Jelly Roll Mortons, the Louis Armstrongs, the Duke Ellingtons, didn’t spend their nights exploring the music of the past. “We can only speculate about Armstrong’s participation in jam sessions and other live performances,” Nisenson says, “but certainly his solos heard on the Hot Fives and Sevens were the result of a great amount of trial and error. In other words, like other innovators, his discovery and development of the jazz solo was not as sharply sudden as the records seem . . . [but] were really the result of a long period of hard work and careful, steady progress.” Their heat was created in a furnace of improvisation that was stoked with a fuel that was very much of their own place and time.

Nisenson shares the disappointment of Piazza and Marsalis with many of the experiments of the last 30 years, in which “the emphasis on individual ‘self-expression’ had paradoxically become a cliche that was strangling the music’s ability to move into more interesting areas.” He just doesn’t believe that neoclassicism, the return to Ellington, is a more interesting area.

The real question, perhaps, is whether the activities of Marsalis and Co. are simply a useful way to stop the strangling, to loosen the knot. It is possible, after all, to praise some of the Young Lions as excellent players (the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, chief among many) while praying for a thunderstorm of inspiration to move them into a more interesting area, one that listens and then speaks to our time.

This is hardly a new argument. In his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (yes, you cats, other art forms have argued over their deaths in the past too), the novelist John Barth acknowledged that being technically up to date may be the least important attribute of a writer. But certainly, Barth added, being out of date is a bad thing. But Marsalis has not made himself a flash point because of his theorizing or his work in the brass sections of the boonies. It is as the curator of the Jazz at Lincoln Center series that Marsalis has sparked a debate about the future of jazz that has engaged the Piazzas and enraged the Nisensons and plenty of musicians as well.

“Since Lincoln Center is primarily a museum for music rather than a center for the creation of a living art,” Nisenson writes, “Marsalis’ revivalism and backward-looking musical philosophy fit right into its cultural design.” As the song goes, so what? Aren’t museums OK? Jazz has been around long enough to have generated more than a few King Tuts, and I don’t see why any gifted curator should be denied the opportunity to do a little dusting and cataloging. Matisse learned a few new tricks, after all, when he went to the museum and got a load of Cezanne’s apples.

The real problem is when curating becomes confused with creating. In jazz, as Nisenson rightly points out, “improvisation--or at least the feeling of improvisation--is the heart of the music, and therefore the performer is the composer.”

The problem is that the museum of Lincoln Center is so big, and the financial stakes of jazz recording in the ‘90s so much higher than ever before, that it’s not long before bitterness leads to name-calling, and the name they’re calling starts with an R. Both Piazza and Nisenson jump into this particular gutter, albeit wearing pious galoshes, saying how sorry they are to have to mention racism, but. . . . Many white critics, but even black musicians like Wayne Shorter, have tagged Marsalis for paying homage to second-line African American musicians like Dewey Redman, for instance, before saluting genuine white jazz pioneers like Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman. Marsalis’ supporters in turn have attacked these critics for not acknowledging the singular influence of African Americans on the development of jazz.

Polemic is as American as jazz. But it becomes tired real quickly, especially when it forces you to make lists. After surviving the Piazza and Nisenson books, I turned to the Smithsonian’s beautiful coffee table-size “Seeing Jazz,” an inspired “jam session” that sets jazz within “a supercharged cultural continuum in which painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, novelists, and essayists have worked (and played) to capture with their pens and brushes, their wood and paper, and with light the irresistible note and trick and dance of the music.”

A brief personal collection of its editors, “Seeing Jazz” appears to have a little bit of everything: Milt Hinton photographs of Lester Young and J.C. Heard, Romare Bearden paintings, Matisse’s cutout cover of his book “Jazz,” bits of Kerouac and Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys and Thulani Davis. It’s a quick improv, a juxtaposition of real creativity and quality. And then, still under the influence of the Marsalis controversy, I did the count. Two photos of white musicians, four if you count the late Max Gordon of “The Village Vanguard” and the anonymous “Swing Fan” of Charles Peterson’s 1938 photo (levitating in suit and tie and pure joy in front of his phonograph).

I hated myself for counting. But I hated the polemicists more for making me.