Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that. He'll theorize at length about what music Young's father might have heard as a young man, but won't discuss how being torn away from his mother at a tender age might have damaged the psyche of one of the most sensitive men ever to play jazz. (When Young, late in life, leaves his own wife and children, it gets barely a mention...
...decades it took to write his book to track down any of the Army personnel who served with Young, many of whom could be presumed to have been still alive when Daniels began his research - he began a long-time association with Norman Granz's floating jam session, called Jazz at the Philharmonic. A few weeks after his dishonorable discharge, Young appeared at the January, 1946 concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium at Los Angeles. The air was electric that night, because this was to be a meeting of the titans: Lester Young, the great tenor genius of the Swing...
...Daniels' contempt for jazz writers and critics knows no bounds, but his own attempts at musicological analysis are feeble at best. He continually drags in tangential asides to the history of Black culture that, while interesting in themselves, shed little light on jazz's most enigmatic artist. He's apparently tracked down the names of nearly every Lester Young relative that appears in any phone book in America in the early 20th century (and pedantically mentions them all), but Young's own relationship with Billie Holiday, with whom he had one of the most productive partnerships in jazz history...
...Belushi in Wired has a biographer been so ill suited to write the life of a creative artist as Daniels is to write about Lester Young. When it comes to illuminating the background, he can be fitfully incisive, but when it comes to telling the story of one of jazz's most protean geniuses (which is, after all, what a biographer is supposed to do), he achieves what I would have thought impossible - he makes one of the most engrossing lives in the history of American music seem dull...
...When the first volume of Columbia's multi-LP set "The Lester Young Story" (which Sony, shamefully, has still not put out on compact disc) was released in the late 1970s, a critic enthused that this was "jazz at its most Mozartean," and Daniels' take on this assessment is revealing. "The critics' Eurocentric emphasis - as when they likened Young to Mozart, for example - was also troubling? both in and of itself and because it carried such bald connotations of racial superiority in the suggestion that the saxophonist was worthy of comparison with this or that European master." I'll tell...