America’s Classical Music

On the heels of Scott DeVaux’s monumental “The Birth of Bebop” and Ted Gioia’s definitive one-volume survey of America’s classical music, “The History of Jazz,” a bonanza of recent books testifies to the dogged endurance of the art form. In 1960 Dwight Macdonald marveled at “the amazing survival of jazz despite the exploitative onslaughts of half a century of commercial entrepreneurs.” Given the rise of rock that has hijacked jazz’s once-perennial audience of the young and the public’s confusion of jazz with media-hyped ephemera like Kenny G and the Yellow Jackets, who now share CD bins with Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, it’s encouraging to find publishers willing to gamble on this stubborn and sometimes unfashionable art.

The publication of Gary Giddins’ “Riding on a Blue Note” in 1981 signaled the arrival of a premier jazz critic. His sixth book, “Visions of Jazz,” is Giddins’ magnum opus, 690 pages of painstakingly researched devotion that reveal his remarkable catholicity of taste, or rather passion. Eschewing a chronological, or even an orderly, history of the music, Giddins’ loosely structured series of essays celebrates such diverse musicians and styles as Bert Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Irving Berlin, Bunk Johnson and the New Orleans Revivalists, Coleman Hawkins, Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Art Tatum, Rosemary Clooney, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Nat Cole, Bud Powell, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Joshua Redman, Charles Mingus and the contemporary avant-garde and even extends to the not so far afield as klezmer and Spike Jones. Immune to the parochial and exclusionary virus that infests too many jazz critics, Giddins is that rarity, a jazz writer with a genuinely engaging literary style who ranks with other masters of this elusive craft--Otis Ferguson, Whitney Balliett and Gene Lees. He sweeps us along with a felicitous turn of phrase and trenchant wit, even when one can’t share his enthusiasm for Al Jolson or bristles at his seeming preference for Cecil Taylor over Bill Evans.

On the blues: “Pianists who are great virtuosos in other idioms have spent years shoveling one Blues chorus after another without getting close to a genuinely creative or satisfying Blues . . . millions of such choruses have been played without exhausting the form and its possibilities. The Blues remains the outer domain of musical exploration. You enter every chorus at peril, tempted by cliche and banality. Yet when you negotiate the trip perfectly, whether a single stanza or a whole series of them finessed with expeditious turnbacks, nothing in art is more satisfying.”

On Count Basie: “Basie is the easiest pianist to mimic badly--you can learn a couple of Basie licks in minutes, even if you’ve never previously touched a piano--and almost impossible to imitate well. . . . Basie’s genius was a result of timing, and in this respect he was as inimitable as Jack Benny.”

On Sinatra: “[T]he voice is honed with craftsmanship so knowing it doesn’t have to call attention to itself. Many people give no thought to his technical virtuosity until they sing along with a record and find themselves gasping for air as Sinatra casually plots a sixteen-bar phrase with one exhalation, too subtly manipulated for you to notice anything but the absolute dramatic rightness of his decision. . . . The generosity he wasn’t always able to summon in life was the very marrow of his gift to music.”

Such passages are meant for the general reader, though there’s solid meat for professional musicians as well, with a wealth of musical notations and analyses of recorded solos. Giddins’ eclectic range and meticulous attention to detail are nothing less than astonishing, as he focuses on overlooked artists such as Budd Johnson, Pee Wee Russell and Frankie Newton and on long-obscure recordings of Dizzy Gillespie, Artie Shaw and Stan Getz. What impresses throughout is Giddins’ expansive generosity, though a few prickly exceptions sneak through. Rarely has the oft-abused Stan Kenton been treated to such lofty disdain: “His kitsch masterpieces [include] Kenton/Wagner . . . a perfect match, a sort of sturm and real slow drang . . . pardon the tongue in my cheek, but there is something about Kenton and his music that wedges it in there.” Giddins’ vicious attack echoes the critical establishment’s often unfair damnation of James Lincoln Collier’s contentious biography, “Duke Ellington.” But such spleen-venting is rare in “Visions of Jazz,” a landmark destined to occupy a permanent niche on the shelf of essential jazz literature.

The same could be said for the late Peter Pettinger’s welcome full-scale biography “Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings.” Since Evans first surfaced in the late ‘50s with his galvanizing piano on George Russell’s “Concerto for Billy the Kid” and “All About Rosie,” followed by Miles Davis’ epochal “Kind of Blue,” he supplanted Bud Powell as the prime keyboard influence; few would question that he remains so to this day. Unlike Powell, whose frenetic agitations restricted his audience to musicians, critics and the jazz hard-core, Evans leaped across all barriers of age, time and musical persuasion to enchant a nearly universal audience. A popular Fantasy album was aptly titled “Everybody Digs Bill Evans.” Classical musicians like Pettinger, an international concert pianist for 25 years, joined the jazz community and thousands new to jazz in embracing Evans’ rapt merger of post-Parker jazz and Debussy, crafted with an effortless technique and delicacy of touch that invites comparison to Walter Gieseking. For all of his ethereal and wistful romanticism, Evans everlastingly swung--and very hard--until his death in 1980 at age 51.

Pettinger’s first encounter with an Evans record suggests a religious experience: “He sounded like a classical pianist and yet he was playing jazz. I was captured . . . by the plaintive harmony, the lyrical tone and the fresh textures [and] the very idea that one style of music could be played with the skills and finesse normally brought to another. A listener felt like an eavesdropper, communing on a privileged one-to-one level. Through this quality--this ‘presence’--Bill Evans today gets through to listeners from all walks of life in a way that many other musicians do not.”

The book may appeal more to specialists than to the casual reader, because Pettinger, with his practiced ear, examines every Evans record, composition, club date and collaborator, his literary gifts and his tragedy-ridden life: a crippling heroin addiction, a host of afflictions including hepatitis, the suicides of his first wife and his beloved brother Harry and the death at 25 of his ground-breaking bassist Scott La Faro in a fiery auto crash. It’s amazing that Evans could surmount these horrors to pursue a career of such fertility and achievement. Even a right arm numbed by a heroin needle didn’t cancel a week’s engagement at the Village Vanguard.

His keyboard predecessor, “the amazing Bud Powell,” as he was well-labeled, was not so adroit at overcoming his devils: clinical schizophrenia aggravated by police head-clubbings, electroshock “therapy” and hospital-administered drugs that rendered him comatose. Late recordings reveal Powell running on but one of the 12 cylinders that mesmerized the jazz community, Evans included, when Powell posed a threat to Tatum himself as one of the original members of Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet in the mid-1940s. Like many black musicians, Powell fled the United States in the late 1950s for the sanctuary of Paris, to be housed and nursed by a fanatical devotee, Francis Paudras. Paudras’ memoir, “Dance of the Infidels,” (the title of one of Powell’s many compositions) resonates with unbridled passion, yet aside from photographs never before published, passion is about all this florid remembrance has going for it. From page one, the late author (a suicide in 1997) is “quite aware of how most American Jazz writers regard European amateurs . . . as having a romanticized vision of jazz and a false idea of the jazz world,” then proves it by enjoining the reader to tromp through 356 pages of unreadable mush.

Yet one must admire Paudras’ disarming courage in flaunting a tiresome Gallic conceit: “The French may have less first-hand knowledge than those Americans who lived through these musical events, but apparently all their combined knowledge has not enabled the American writers to produce the kinds of genuine studies that we, such true lovers of jazz, so yearn for.” (Italics mine.) Pauline Kael, in her canny review of Bernard Tavernier’s deeply flawed film “Round Midnight,” based on the Powell-Paudras alliance, wrote that “the French are never more irritating than when they tell us how much more they appreciate our music than we do.” Ripping aside the adolescent outpourings of the author, we confront a harrowing account of the tormented life of a musical genius and the selfless dedication of Paudras, who kept Bud Powell afloat until he died in 1966.

Despite its fevered excess, “Dance of the Infidels” joins “Visions of Jazz” and “Bill Evans” in celebrating an ongoing miracle: how the music of black America began as a rural folk entertainment in the 19th century, spread to the cities and, catalyzed by burgeoning technology--the phonograph and radio--merged with the best of Broadway and white popular songs with the centuries-old tradition of European concert music and the ethnic music of every continent to evolve into an infinitely varied and highly complex art. And despite insidious racial, social and artistic prejudice--damned by the pulpit, the academy and the middle-class, black and white alike, often ignored or misrepresented by the mass media and of late dismissed by young audiences as “music our parents listened to”--it endured and thrived to become the planet’s first and only universal language. And if this is not a miracle, what is?