All That Jazz

Jazz musicians regard most writers on jazz as incompetent and therefore irrelevant--except as the criticism affects their careers. As the imperturbable alto saxophonist Benny Carter, a legend among his peers, once said of critics: “They sing not, neither do they play, hence forget them or forgive them.”

Lay listeners, however, are less discriminating and eagerly consume anything written about jazz--if only, at times, to echo the musicians’ derision of the critics. Interest in reading about jazz is becoming more evident with more high school and college courses focusing on the music’s roots. Wynton Marsalis--the Leonard Bernstein of contemporary jazz educators--has persistently argued for immersion in the music’s history among young players as well as its listeners.

“The Oxford Companion to Jazz” should attract both camps. Edited by Bill Kirchner, the 59 essays commissioned for this volume present an ambitious panorama of genres, biographies and analyses of the infusion of jazz into the already protean cultures of other countries. As someone who has imperiled friendships with various jazz musicians by writing on the music for more than 50 years, I opened this book and first compared Kirchner’s selection of specialists with those I would have chosen. And I quickly decided that even Carter might find this book of interest because some of the writers included in the anthology are jazz players. And at least one, Gene Lees, has worked clubs as a singer while also working as a skillful professional lyricist. Bassist Bill Crow writes about his instrument; composer-historian Gunther Schuller focuses on the masters of the trombone; and among others, a premier musician-arranger-critic, Loren Schoenberg, illuminates the continually inventive Lester (“I am not a repeater pencil”) Young.

Years ago, I was co-editor of the Jazz Review, the first magazine for which only jazz musicians were allowed to write. One of the motivations was to break the stereotype that jazz players were practically illiterate, except on their instruments.

Among the writers for the Jazz Review was pianist Dick Katz, who remains a singularly lyrical and un-categorizable as well as a nonpareil analyst of the infinite varieties of jazz improvisation on that instrument. His solo here is his illuminating “Pianists of the 1940s and 1950s.”

Carter would appreciate the fact that Kirchner is a multi-reed player, a composer-arranger who teaches jazz history and composition at the New School University in New York. (I used to play clarinet and soprano saxophone very unprofessionally and only fantasized being on the road. The closest I came was when Benny Goodman startled me by asking me to recommend a tenor saxophonist for his band.)

By my criteria, Kirchner has chosen among the best-qualified enthusiasts in these various domains, and Kirchner himself was the choice of Sheldon Meyer, whom I regard as the editor-in-chief of jazz, for since 1951 he has published, at Oxford University Press, more essential books on jazz than have appeared on the collected jazz lists of all other publishers. “The Oxford Companion to Jazz” was Meyer’s idea and project.

Of the writers in this collection from whom I have learned a great deal over the years, I would especially cite Mark Tucker, the compiler of “The Duke Ellington Reader,” the quintessential book on Duke. Max Morath had a lot to do, as a pianist and scholar, with the revival of interest in ragtime. Dan Morgenstern, whose Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University is the archive of jazz, writes with personal knowledge about Louis Armstrong.

My other first choices, as were Kirchner’s, would have been Lewis Porter on John Coltrane, Gerald Early on jazz and American literature, Will Friedwald on jazz singing since the 1940s, and Samuel A. Floyd on “African Roots of Jazz,” among other writers.

There is, however, one major omission in this companion. Though women are included in this volume as singers, pianists and composer-arrangers, there are no essays on women instrumentalists or on all-female jazz bands. It’s true that there is a long-held myth among many jazz aficionados, and not a few musicians, that women don’t have “the chops” to swing as vigorously and deeply as men.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I went to a Woody Herman performance in Boston, and on the way were chortling with anticipated scorn because we’d heard Woody had just hired a “chick” in the trumpet section. To our astonishment, Billie Rogers stood up and blew us away. But Rogers, alas, is left out of Kirchner’s book. At least she is in the index to a valuable new book on the largely forgotten history of female jazz, “Swing Shift: All-Girl Bands of the 1940s” by Sherrie Tucker. With all the jazz reissues pouring forth, it’s worth noting that there is a definitive edition on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm--an all-women and, initially, all-black band that toured between 1930 and 1949 (Scarecrow Press’ “International Sweethearts of Rhythm,” by D. Antoinette Handy). Its tenor saxophone soloist, Vi Burnside, could “cut”--as they used to say in jam sessions--many macho male duelers.

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The late Leonard Feather wrote a widely read feature, “The Blindfold Test,” in Down Beat magazine in which musicians were asked to listen to recordings and identify the players by name, originality and often by race. Never, so far as I can remember, by gender. Were I now conducting such a test, I’d play Sherrie Maricle’s “I Believe in You” album by Diva, an all-female orchestra, and her quintet, “Five Play: On the Brink,” both on Arbors Records. I’d bet a lot, if not the farm, that these improvisers would not be revealed as “chicks.” And, in the 1,300 high school bands entering New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center’s band competition last year, 40% of the musicians were girls. But there are no women in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Another omission in this jazz companion is among the writers. There is nothing by Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for the New Yorker. Wherever I was asked to write a liner note for a John Coltrane recording, Coltrane would always say when I called, “Please, no notes. If the music doesn’t speak for itself, what’s the use?” Being a man of generous spirit, he would finally succumb: “OK, what do you want to know?” Of all the writers who have written about jazz, Balliett has come closest to making words reflect the dynamics, even the timbres, of jazz. Unaccountably underused in recent years at the New Yorker, Balliett is represented in the invaluable “Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2000,” which has just been released by St. Martin’s Press.

I would also like to have seen an essay on the business of jazz that would have taken into account the predatory record companies and club owners who have led some musicians to take courses in contract law, and the often crucially influential booking agents, like the volcanic Joe Glaser, who had a more than nodding acquaintance with Al Capone’s colleagues in Chicago and who later became the career-shaper of Louis Armstrong and other jazz luminaries.

Also of contentious value would have been a report on race in jazz: the humiliation and sometimes perils for many musicians of being on the road in the Jim Crow South, and not only in the South. And also the later reverse racism, such as when Miles Davis got a lot of heat from black musicians for bringing white pianist Bill Evans into his combo. “Hell,” said Miles, “I wouldn’t care if he was green and purple with polka dots, if he can play.”

These dissonances aside, “The Oxford Companion to Jazz” is up to Sheldon Meyer’s standard and therefore becomes a durable addition to the literature of the music. Of course, as Coltrane once said, the music has to speak for itself, but these essays should lead to an irresistible urge to hear more.