Jump to content

Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia Of Jazz In The Sixties


Recommended Posts

8 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:


If you (or whoever repeated this statement ad nauseam through the times) think Flip Phillips (or buy this story unchecked) was honking that extremely then you ain't heard many out-and-out honkers.

And when it comes to "taste", all those honkers were just forerunners of the screechers and squeakers like Brötzmann et al. to come on in later decades anyway.

YMMV (or one man's meat being another man's poison) indeed and off-tone phrasing can be interpreted in a number of ways as you can see, even if such analogies are anathema to some out there (yes I know ... ) ;)



 

You misunderstand what I was saying. I have no problem with Flip's honking. My point was that Kernfeld said that Flip was popular with JATP audiences DESPITE his honking, which HE described as "rather tasteless," when it's obvious from JATP concert recordings that JATP audiences went crazy WHEN Flip honked and BECAUSE he did.

As for Flip's honking at JATP versus that of "many out-and-out honkers," I was making no such comparison but merely pointing out that Flip's honking, contra Kernfeld, clearly DELIGHTED many members of the JATP audience and that that is what made him a jazz "star" at the time. Likewise for Illinois Jacquet. That both Phillips and Jacquet were excellent soloists across the board goes without saying.

It's as though Kernfeld had written: "Despite their rather tasteless ascents to the trumpet's upper register, Maynard Ferguson's performances were popular with audiences."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for elaborating on this but I think I did get you right about the distinction between "despite" and "because" (and agree with your correction that he should have said "because" from the start) . I am not even that surprised that he wrote what he wrote because all this "tastelessness" angle was what very often was held against Philips, Jacquet, Ventura and their brothers by the self-professed cognoscenti covering the music in writing. Regardless of how the audiences felt about it. It just was the common approach to how this form of musical immediacy of these artists was seen at the time by many who wrote about it.
I just felt that when assessments like this are (understandably) singled out from TODAY's point of view then perhaps criticism of these assessments might want to dwell just as much on whether the "tasteless" tag was all that appropriate in the first place, considering at what time the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1st ed.) came along. The author really was a bit late to the game in regurgitating such labels that used to be applied to more extrovert forms of the music in the 40s or 50s. We all know what came afterwards and how soon these criteria became obsolete or at least extremely subjective.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, many would-be cognoscenti felt that way about Phillips, Jacquet et al. when JATP was new and very popular. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz was published in 1988, however, some 40 years later. Again, whether or not one regarded Phillips, Jacquet, Ventura, et al. as "tasteless" in 1948 or  in 1988 is one thing, but totally misreading, 40 years after the fact and as the editor of a supposed reference work, the actual relationship between that supposed tastelessness and why audiences responded positively to an artist is something else altogether.

BTW, that edition of Jazz/Grove has no entry for Peggy Lee but does have one for Maria Muldaur. It also says of Astrud Gilberto: "Her work has an economy of melodic line and a steady momentum akin to that of Basie" -- helpfully adding "but its rhythmic drive is often devoid of contours."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

You misunderstand what I was saying. I have no problem with Flip's honking. My point was that Kernfeld said that Flip was popular with JATP audiences DESPITE his honking, which HE described as "rather tasteless," when it's obvious from JATP concert recordings that JATP audiences went crazy WHEN Flip honked and BECAUSE he did.

As for Flip's honking at JATP versus that of "many out-and-out honkers," I was making no such comparison but merely pointing out that Flip's honking, contra Kernfeld, clearly DELIGHTED many members of the JATP audience and that that is what made him a jazz "star" at the time. Likewise for Illinois Jacquet. That both Phillips and Jacquet were excellent soloists across the board goes without saying.

It's as though Kernfeld had written: "Despite their rather tasteless ascents to the trumpet's upper register, Maynard Ferguson's performances were popular with audiences."

Yes - that was Kernfeld, not Lees.

I have to admit I kind of liked the Lees Jazzletter & was a subscriber.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, jlhoots said:

Yes - that was Kernfeld, not Lees.

I have to admit I kind of liked the Lees Jazzletter & was a subscriber.

The bone I had to pick with Lees, aside from disagreeing with many of his opinions, had to do with dubious ethical behavior on his part. After I had written that negative review for the Chicago Tribune of Jazz/Grove, it fell under the eyes of Leonard Feather, who was of course an interested party (the book was a rival to his "Encyclopedia") and he alerted Lees, who got in touch with me, said he was planning to write a takedown of "Jazz/Grove" for "Jazzletter," and asked me what my piece had said. Naively perhaps, I filled him in on all the IMO choice errors and flubs in Jazz/Grove, and each time I mentioned something, even though Lees  claimed to have looked through Jazz/Grove already, his response was "my gosh!," "I can't believe it!" or words to that effect. Then he sends me the edition of "Jazzletter" that has his review of "Jazz/Grove." Each thing I had mentioned in my review and had told Lees about on the phone -- again, each time, to his apparent astonishment -- was in his review but without any attribution, as though Lees had found all these errors and flubs himself when it clear from our conversation that everything I had said in my review was new to him. OK, chalk that up to my naivete and to Lees' ... whatever you want to call it. Then, a ways down the road, someone sends me a copy of the program booklet for the L.A.-based Playboy Jazz Festival of that year, for which Feather was the head honcho. In the booklet there's a negative piece about "Jazz/Grove" from a young L.A.-based jazz journalist that cites most of the errors and flubs I had found, again without attribution, and IIRC adds nothing new, though at this point I don't recall whether that writer tipped his cap to Lees. You live and learn.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stanley Dance really had a thing about Lees, always calling out his almost(?) exclusive favoring of "cats of all colors" who exhibited, uh..."respectable" and/or "middle class" lifestyles and attitudes. 

I generally enjoyed Lees pieces, even as I noticed that Dance had a rather good point. But Leonard Feather...that guy seemed to always have an angle that either diverted the conversation around to his doings, or controversies that he was engaged in. Sure, he wrote a lot, and it was not devoid of real information. But nevertheless, fuck Leornard Feather, by and large, exceptions allowed when really valid, but I don't know that all that many are.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But one thing should not be forgotten: Even if they had some opinions I can´t agree with, men like Leonard Feather were inside the music. And compare his liner-notes to some silly obscure liner notes on some older Verve albums. They are short and not really informative and sometimes there is a longer essay but it seems that it was not written by someone who really heard the music, a lot of bla bla . The worst was the Bird album Jazz Perennial, there someone writes about different "schools in jazz" and invents a "purist school" and something about "young turks"...... Those Verves with their odd liner notes really are strange.....and the music is well recorded, but it doesn´t seem to be "with heart and soul"....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree with your point of view. Someone who was present when the events took place is a better source than someone who either is an outsider looking in or someone who came along much later.
IMO in order to understand the historical developments it still is preferable to consult CONTEMPORARY documents (to the extent possible) from when the events actually took place, i.e. PRIMARY sources. We are in the comfortable position today to be able to obtain information from a lot of documents written at various points in history and can therefore judge things in a better way as it is easier to obtain an overview of contrasting statements and opinions and descriptions of events. And as we hopefully are relatively well aware of blind spots or one-sided views that some authors and scribes of the past (such as Feather) may have had we wil be able to make our own judgments in a better way (particularly since it is far from sure that today's writers are that much more objective - many of them have their OWN agendas too). I for one know that in most cases I am gaining more insight about the history of the music by reading contemporary sources from, say, the 40s or 50s than from books of latter-day self-proclaimed fans or experts of the music written much, much later that all too often amount to rehashing the "accepted wisdom" as seen TODAY. Those "tertiary" sources have their place in writing about history but compared to original source documents they have to be very, very good, in-depth and comprehensive (and fact-based instead of being all about personal opinions) if we latter-borns are to REALLY understand today how history happened and not how we are SUPPOSED to see today that history happened.

P.S. I also agree about your assessment of the typical Verve liner notes too. They all too often are just laughable. It is amazing how even a label not usually touted as a prime jazz label such as Decca often came up with better and more informative liner notes that tell you something about the contents that you would be able to use as source material for historical essays today, for example.

Edited by Big Beat Steve
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I trusted Feather to "be there", but I never trusted him to not somehow make it about himslef, like "there" was Leonard Feather, not the music. Leonard Feather got to where he decided what music came to him, not what music he went to. Not about taste, it was about ego and who would flatter him with their access. And then he wrote liner notes and "encyclopedias" accordingly.

Best as I can tell, he started out ok enough. But it seemed to have gotten worse as time went on, too. Like they kept feeding the animal and the animal finally turned into a beast. And the longer he lived in California, really, the worse - and more blatantly obvious - it became. I remember one guy, Milcho Leviev, oh my god, Feather was pimping this guy HARD, like he was the Ginormous Future Of International jazz, really, it was that big a pimp, and, ok, yes, Leviev was a talent for sure, but Feather just blew him and his "importance" waaaaaay out of proportion. And for what? Just becuase Leviev would accept Feather's overture to be grant access.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Best as I can tell, he started out ok enough. But it seemed to have gotten worse as time went on, too.

You see this is ONE point that had gotten me thinking only yesterday. As it happens, my current bedside reading matter is the 1945 Esquire Jazz Book (have had the magazine-sized edition for many years but bought an incredibly cheap hardback book copy last Saturday and found it is about time for a re-read). This book includes a recap of the situation of the jazz scene and its major exponents in 1944 - written by Feather himself. In that chapter he also mentions the Eddie Condon jam sessions and Town Hall concerts and dwells (almost at length so, given the length of the total chapter) on how many of these concerts and get-togethers turned into a musical near-shambles, how many of the musicians present resented being limited to a Dixieland repertoire, how Joe Marsala hated playing this or that tune, how Edmond Hall found himself ill at ease and him and others felt they were never able to give their best in these settings, how George Wettling hated being pigeonholed as a Dixieland drummer and so on ...
This has set me thinking ... What's really to this? Pretty sharp contrast with how these concerts and jam sessions are seen in the history of that facet of jazz everywhere else (except by stern anti-moldy figs, of course ... :P) and how often all those involved were present at those Condon concerts and sessions for years and years in the 40s and beyond, etc. (Was it all about the money, was there that much money to be made, were they strong-armed into participating?)
Feather did not mention any of this in his "The Jazz Years" book when talking about his Esquire days - so ... What was to this story in 1944? Have these feelings by the musicians been reported elsewhere? And if so, why would Feather have omitted pointing out all this gleefully in his Jazz Years book? As he did in other cases ... Or did he inflate all this because he had a bone to pick with Condon in 1944 and rubbed it in on that occasion but made his peace with Condon later on? Or ....?

 

 

Edited by Big Beat Steve
Link to comment
Share on other sites

And the sticking point with Feather for me is that you just can't ever be sure. He was an early-ish proponent of bebop, but as he always seemed to like to do, he also like to provoke some kind of "versus" conversation or attitude. He did it again with the whole "anti-jazz" thing, the guy was always looking for a controversy to stir up or further stir up that he could then referee. Seemed like he was an Authority On Being An Authority. I will give him that.

I just don't like the guy's energy, even when his facts are correct.

And another bone I have with him, in the Seventies "encylopedia", there was a very rich thing going on in Watts and other African-American pockets of LA. Feather wrote extensively about "West Coast Jazz" guys of the old school who were still active, as well as the East Coasters who moved west and with whom he was already connected, but very little, if in fact any at all, about Horace Tapscott, Sonny Criss, Billy Higgins, Harold Land, or any of the newer voices emerging around their world.

Which is all fine, I mean write about what you want to write about, and those people certainly deserved coverage, but any book that purports to be an "encyclopedia" should at least attempt to be comprehensive in scope, not myopic.

And it's with those eyes, the ones I read with in real time, that I then went back and looked at the older work, and, yes, I definitely saw those tendencies there as well.

So, yeah, I no longer neither enjoy nor seek out Leonard Feather. For anything.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 19/10/2017 at 4:16 AM, Gheorghe said:

But one thing should not be forgotten: Even if they had some opinions I can´t agree with, men like Leonard Feather were inside the music. And compare his liner-notes to some silly obscure liner notes on some older Verve albums. They are short and not really informative and sometimes there is a longer essay but it seems that it was not written by someone who really heard the music, a lot of bla bla . The worst was the Bird album Jazz Perennial, there someone writes about different "schools in jazz" and invents a "purist school" and something about "young turks"...... Those Verves with their odd liner notes really are strange.....and the music is well recorded, but it doesn´t seem to be "with heart and soul"....

I believe Norman Granz wrote those early unattributed Verve sleeve notes. At least the critic Benny Green told a story in which he told Granz how awful the notes on his Verve albums were and asked who wrote them. "I did," said Granz and gave Green the job of doing them instead.

Regarding Feather I became aware of him very early in my jazz-album collecting life because he wrote so many sleeve notes on famous albums. He struck me as a bit of a blowhard from the off and at that stage I didn't know anything about him -- just a vibe, I suppose, since confirmed as correct. Nat Hentoff and Stanley Dance seemed to write all the other sleeve notes of that era. They seemed fine to me then and still do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gitler a lot of times seems corny in retrospect )to me), but his "I was there, here's what I saw" recountings of those Prestige sessions still rings true, warm, and sincere to me. Compared to Feather's "hey, look what I'm making, either on this record or in my book" vibe, which also rings true, but in the sense that it is true that there are assholes in this world and in this business.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

One of Leonard Feather's oddest moments occurred in liner notes for a Phil Woods album. He said that the Woods' song title "HUK2E" "doesn't mean anything." I knew that expression, a favorite of my father's, back in the 1960s. It always helps to ask the artist when he or she is available.

You've got me intrigued Ken. I did a quick search but only Phil Woods came up. Care to share the meaning?

Q

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ah, Feather. In my one encounter he behaved like an a-hole. He also often insisted musicians record his tunes, which were usually awful; only he could produce a dull session with Hot Lips Page.

as for Lees; oi. Most specifically, IMHO, his racial views were warped by his failure to understand that no matter what black musicians said to white critics about race, it was often not the same thing that they said to fellow African American musicians. It was/is essential to understand this and not accept his 'they understood that even though I was white, I understood,' routine.

Also Lees has a passage somewhere in which he explains to us why jazz cannot tolerate post-Coltrane modernism; he offers some ignorant and bizarre literary theory to explain this.

On the other hand, I like his books, which frequently have profiles of musicians not profiled elsewhere.

 

Edited by AllenLowe
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...