Word: jazzes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WRITING ABOUT JAZZ is a perverse activity. It's like killing a mockingbird--you learn little by the autopsy of music whose essence is life. The terms of Western classical music are stodgily inadequate when it comes to jazz, but scholars continually try to dissect it, and the resulting musicological babble about "flatted fifths" and "characteristic negro rhythms" is typically boring and insensitive to the music...
...Jazz Makers, at least, does not try to assess the contributions of famous musicians within a single contrived framework. Nine writers worked independently to produce 21 profiles; the editors stress the absence of a predetermined formula. Appropriately, most of the writers chose to place much emphasis on the extra-musical lives of the musicians. A few well-chosen biographical details can often shed more light on the highly personal art of jazz creation than pages of technical dissection. For instance, A.B. Spellman's Black Music: Four Lives, a classic in the field of jazz literature, was conceived largely...
...STYLISTIC weaknesses, The Jazz Makers would still be a sound if unexciting introduction to jazz were it not for another set of limitations. The Da Capo edition of The Jazz Makers is actually a reprint of a book published by Rinehart in 1957. Although Da Capo reveals this significant bit of information only in the copyright, the text proclaims its age on nearly every page. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary anthology of jazz personalities without Davis, Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane but the only modernists in The Jazz Makers are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whose innovations...
...publication of this 22-year-old book is justified by the current renaissance of interest in classic jazz, and the decision to package the book as new and thus capitalize on Hentoff's now-respected name can be written off as good marketing, but the publishers have made one unforgivable blunder. Each profile in The Jazz Makers ends with a selected discography of five to ten records that represent an artist's most significant work. These discographies were compiled from records readily available in 1957. Now they're all out of print, and many of the recording companies have gone...
...homages to Matisse never ended. Matisse's insistence on achieving structure through local color contrast lies behind Bruce's post-cubist compositions of 1916, in which he tried, not altogether successfully, to fuse color with the implied movement of sculpture and the actual movements of jazz dance...