Larry Kart

For Ghost and others, I should say that some may found Gushee's Creole Jazz Band book -- "Pioneers of Jazz (Oxford University Press) rather dry or even frustrating, because it's a book about a band that is no doubt of great importance ("the first group [1914-18] to bring authentic jazz out of New Orleans to audiences around America") but one that never recorded. What Gushee sets out to, and manages, to do though is assemble every carefully weighed and tested contextual fact about who these guys were and what their clearly quite influential music was like that can possibly be determined. For me, the information grows more exciting and significant as it accumulates, while the nature of the quest is in some ways just as much of a kick (if that's the weay to put it), because it feels like Gushee (and through him, you the reader) are reaching back into the jazz past and touching with remarkable directness what before this would have been deemed unknowable at all or unverifable myth. There's a kind of moral strength running though the whole enterprise that's very moving.

I find myself asking the first question more than I probably should -- which is in effect a tribute to what (or part of what) Clementine is up to. No answers, only guesses, but then that's a big part of the "what." Whatever -- why he writes that way can't I think be separated from the "who is he?" question, which again is in effect a tribute to etc.

I've almost finished re-reading Gennari's "Blowin' Hot and Cool" and am somewhat surprised to find that its New Jazz Studies underpinnings, which I still detect at work, are far less explicitly present than I recall. In fact, one could fault the book, which after all was published this year, for paying almost no direct attention to the NJS movement, which has been vigorously doing its stuff for more than a decade now and arguably has had as much or more of an impact on the world of jazz discourse than anything else that's been up and running during that period of time -- both in terms of what the NJS folks are saying and in the success with which they've been able to colonize the academic world. About the NJS underpinnings being at work in the book but in a less explicit manner than I'd thought the first time through, I'd say that a great many of the cited judgments/estimates that are given the most weight by Gennari (as in so-and-so "shrewdly" says or "tellingly" points out) are from NJS texts, and that his own approach for the most part is that of NJS's style, we are the first generation to be truly wised-up "contextualization."

I posted this back in May, and it's what I still feel as I re-read the book. What I plan to do now is immerse myself after re-reading Gennari in a big stewpot of New Jazz Studies stuff (BTW, that is what the NJS folks call themselves) to make sure that I'm right in thinking that Gennari is, as I think he is, reading the history of jazz criticism so that the NJS approach is both the cure and the culmination. Another aspect of the book that drives me crazy and that is connected to what I've already said is the way it blithely (or so it seems, but it isn't really blithe at all) takes chunks of the past that you have direct experience of and transforms them into things that are quite distant from and alien to what you and others actually experienced. [as though] the room they checked in to isn't there, there's no door for it, the wife and daughter have vanished, the people at the hotel say they've never seen the man or his wife and daughter before, and the page in the hotel register where the man signed his name doesn't exist. "It Was. But It Ain't." -- to borrow the title of the Charles Olson essay that zeroes on on this evil semi-intellectual con game. First off, forgive me for chopping out the setting for your parallel. I feel it allows me to see more clearly. I just feel you're going to have an awful lot of evidence before you accuse someone of doing evil - especially when you've been online and accused him in this direct way. He can just come right back at you, if he has right of reply. The other thing is this comes across as a bit of a zero-sum game. The whole thing about the deconstructive approach is it works best (and usefully) if you can absorb its insights into a larger frame. Of course you may feel Gennari doesn't have any insights - in which case I guess it would be a game to reduce Jazz history to some arbitrary glop. The only meaning being that he gets to define what the glop is. But if that really is the case, you should be able to find hard evidence. Or anyone someone should. If it's that bad, you could probably deconstruct the text and come up with stuff. But does anyone really want to read a deconstruction of a book deconstructing Jazz history? I think you might be better of demonstrating skewed scholarship. Simon Weil Thanks for the solicitude, Simon, but I'll call 'em as I see 'em and take my chances. Of course, Gennari and anyone else can "come right back" at me if they wish, after reading what I've written. What's wrong with that? And as for me having "accused" him (and the NJS studies movement) online (i.e. here) "in this direct way," I'm afraid I'm only one person with one mind and one set of opinions/conclusions -- though of course those can change a bit over time, and I might express myself a bit differently in an essay-review than I would here. But not much.

Clem -- That was Catullus, not Ovid, though I'm sure Ovid did his share of both.

Jim -- I think your paragraphs three and four above nail it exactly.

He hit Greg Tate.

You Must Be's point, I believe, is that Ornette simply (or perhaps not so simply, given what he could do) "couldn't play like Bird, Sonny, et al." in the specific sense that he couldn't play on/within the harmonic framework/chorus structure of standard sequences. Of course, that's not all that people like Bird, Sonny, et al. did, but they did have that option, and You Must Be thinks that Ornette didn't and doesn't. Martin Williams, for one, said otherwise -- or at least that's one logical way to take Martin's account of having heard Ornette play just like Bird one night, in a response to challenge of some sort, as I recall. But I'd say that I'd agree with You Must Be here, adding that this came about not because Ornette lacked the capacity in any sense to do this but because of a combo of (a) his eccentric initial misunderstandings of certain music basics -- see Litweiler's bio for details on this (b) what and how he began to hear when he began to put what probably now should be called those "musunderstandings" to use and © the fact that Ornette seems by temperament to be at once an innate systematizer and a "lone cat."

Late -- See Chuck Nessa's last post on this thread for the answer: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...mp;#entry557882

Likewise. I vaguely recall being at the apartment of one member of trio, almost certainly Hal Russell's, when the finished album was first available to be listened to. Hal, his wife, Russell Thorne, and Thorne's then girlfriend Shelley Litt (a remarkable jazz singer-pianist) -- she the dedicate of TRhorne's "Knell (For Shel)" -- were the others present, again IIRC. I'm sure Joe Daley wasn't there. I also remember that the mood there that day was not a particularly happy one -- which mostly had to do with feelings about the record and about Daley on the part of Russell and Thorne (I remember mockery of Daley's stagey fake-real tune announcements), but there were a lot of other not very happy things going on as well. A tough crowd.

But Deveaux is writing about what was going on with black swing musicians and their economic situation in that chapter--not about the culture of Downbeat and its readers. And I don't quite get the Berra analogy, humorous as it is on the surface--that the DB article is guilty of only pointing out the obvious? I thought that a lack of obviousness was exactly what was at question here... and again, it wasn't Deveaux's primary "evidence," but a fleeting allusion in a larger chapter. And I've already said that yes, perhaps Deveaux's research could have gone deeper (even though I still agree with his analysis and conclusions)... and you raise interesting questions as well, the kinds of questions which--I hope--Gennari's book will raise as I get further into it. No, DeVeaux is (or needs to be) writing about both things, because he says that the economic situation of black swing musicians was profoundly shaped by the racism of the white public (IIRC, in his view, a situation shaped more profoundly by white racism than any other factor). Thus, evidence about the culture of that white public would seem to be a significant, even crucial. To put it crudely but I hope clearly, can one say that a long gone fan of Artie Shaw in 1940, who at the same time doesn't care much at all for Basie, is a) responding to the relative "whiteness" of Shaw's music as it manifests itself musically because he himself is white b) not attuned to the relative "blackness" of Basie's music as it manifests itself musically because he himself is not black, either because he then doesn't get that it or because he does get it but feels it's not for him c) doesn't like Basie primarily because he consciously or unconsciiously doesn't like or fears black people, regardless of how their music sounds, or ... we could go on and on like this, but my point is that if you're going to really look at such things in a careful, scholarly manner, you really need to look at them that way, not just poke around looking for ways to portray the past so as redress the undoubtedly genuine injustices of that time. About the Yogi remark -- of course, it ups the ante a good deal from the DB citation we were talking about(that's why it struck me funny when it came to mind), but would you cite what Yogi said as evidence of what Russia's climate was like in "them days," even though it almost certainly "sure was cold" then? Ok, you can't explain a joke.

Larry--Of course I understand what the sentence means in a literal sense, but it's no great leap to interpret it as also meaning that Armstrong had great crowd-pleasing/entertainer skills. Because you're essentially saying that you know more than the DB journalist, even though he/she lived through that era and you didn't--and yet you're taking Gennari to task for giving a different interpretation of an era through which you lived and he didn't (not as a perceiving adolescent/adult, anyway--not sure how old Gennari is). Living through an era, of course, does not give one carte blanche in interpreting it, or prove that one is automatically a trustworthy source (and I DO consider you a trustworthy source; your writings always seem grounded in solid, penetrating thought & research), but the DB article, general as it is, is not at odds with other parts of the historical record from that era. Geez. I'm saying that I know more than that DB journalist because what he writes gives me abundant evidence that he doesn't really know much about what he's talking about. I've said in previous posts why I think that's so. To be blunt -- the fact that I'm a fairly bright and curious guy, and this writer, based on the evidence before me, was not seems to me to trump the fact that he was alive and writing in 1940. Is the tone and factuality of a person's discourse not a reasonable guide as to whether they're making sense? And again, no that DB article is not wholly at odds with other parts of the historical record, but both you and DeVeaux cite it as though it were important evidence to be added to that record when, in itself, it isn't. (Somehow I'm reminded of Yogi Berra's supposed reaction to seeing the film version of "Dr. Zhivago" -- "Sure was cold in Russia in them days.") What the article certainly is evidence of, though -- and this may be interesting, though it also may not fit that neatly into DeVeaux's argument -- is that Down Beat in 1940 obviously was willing to print an article that said what this article says. Was the writer's goal simply reportorial? Was it an attempt to stir white guilt or just to create some free-form controversy? (There was a lot of that going on at DB and Metronome in those days.) Was it an article that DB was happy to print or may even have elicted, or was it just something that more or less flew over the transom and was pasted in for lack of something better that week? (I worked at DB and know that that could happen.) Did the article inspire any responses (letters, other articles) that would give us a clue as to how DB's readers took it? How many other articles on this and related subjects appeared in DB and Metronome in those years, and what tacks did they take? My point is that if genuine historical "contextualization" is your goal, you've got to know what kind of stuff you've got your hands on and how to treat it.

Yes, Chris, that's the one, but I've lost my copy. On the other hand, I've stolen from it so many times over the years, and/or just incorporated the parts I've agreed with, that I've probably got most of the book stored away in my memory.

Of course--I just mentioned that he is a musician because of your earlier remark: ...simply that Deveaux is a NJS scholar who's also a musician, and who certainly incorporates analysis of crystallized musical choices into his work. Deveaux cites more than the DB article in the section, "The Wages of Discrimination"--inability of black bands to get prominent hotel gigs, high-profile radio spots, etc. And I took the phrase "high-note appeal" to convey a more general meaning that's somewhat in line with what you say about Armstrong. DB journalism is, as you say, not to be taken as gospel--that's for sure--but it's indicative of what people who were around then were thinking, to a large degree, and DB did exert influence over its audience. (And Ellington was one of a kind, in more ways than one--how many black bandleaders could afford to have their own train, so as not to have to endure the indignities suffered by so many black musicians while touring the South?) And if we can't give any credence to journalism of the era, then the earlier complaint against Gennari: seems at odds, at least indirectly, with the critique of the DB article citation. Which again is NOT to say that DB journalism of the time can stand on its own, etc., but I'm surprised to see it dismissed so readily when there's plenty of other evidence that discrimination affected black bands in many ways. Yes, perhaps Deveaux could have substantiated his argument more thoroughly, but I find it difficult to disagree with his conclusions. I'm really interested in that Gushee book--thanks for mentioning it. And while I understand your not wanting to discuss the Gennari book too much before writing your piece, I'd be eager to read any thoughts you have on Deveaux's "Constructing the Jazz Tradition" after you read it. Ghost -- "High-note appeal" means the appeal to an audience of Armstrong's ability to hit high notes, this being a regular feature of his performances of that time. How you can take "high-note appeal" as a more general statement about Armstrong's all-around skills as an entertainer escapes me. Of course, Ellington was one of a kind, but the DB piece says or implies that he was one of a kind in such a way that he overcame the inability or the unwillingness of the (white) public to "absorb" more than "a limited number of Negro bands." What one wants and needs to know here is why -- both from the point of view of that DB writer and from that of DeVeaux -- that was so (if indeed DeVeaux thinks it was so). You or I could make some reasonable guesses, but my point is that the DB article gives us no clue as to what its writer thinks those reasons might be. My problem with that citation, then, is not that there isn't "plenty of other evidence that discrimination affected black bands in many ways" but that that citation is empty in itself. When a scholar handles material that carelessly, I get suspicious. As for: "And if we can't give any credence to journalism of the era, then the earlier complaint against Gennari: seems at odds, at least indirectly, with the critique of the DB article citation." When I said "takes chunks of the past that you have direct experience of and transforms them into things that are quite distant from and alien to what you and others actually experienced," I simply meant, as I said, chunks of my own past and chunks of the pasts of other people whom I know and trust. Why you think one of those trustworthy other people should be an anonymous 1940 DB journalist whose own words tell me that he's not a very trustworthy source at all escapes me once more. Just because he wrote what he did in 1940? Where's the contradiction here?

Michael -- Do mean the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet album or News for Lulu or More News for Lulu (the latter two with George Lewis and Bill Frisell)? Or all three. Seems to me that the first album fits your description, the second does not, and the third is a good deal better than the second.

That DeVeaux is a musician doesn't mean that he can't also be a tendentious writer/scholar. That 1940 Down Beat citation -- "The truth is that the public will absorb [not "accept"] only a limited number of Negro bands." -- is a good example. No scholar who is familiar with the sorts of journalism that prevailed in Down Beat and Metronome at the time would accept that article at face value, as evidence in and of itself. And evidence of what? That the most popular bands of the time were white? We already knew that. That these bands were more popular BECAUSE they were white, and that the public (the white public only, obviously) didn't like black bands as much BECAUSE they were black? That Down Beat article goes on to say, according to DeVeaux, that of the black bands that had "attained any measure of financial stability," Calloway's did so on the basis of his "personality," Armstrong's on his "high-note appeal," while Ellington's was "sui generis." The first is obviously true as far it goes (which is a fair way), the second is such a tiny part of the truth as to be false (Armstrong's appeal was based on his vast overall gifts as an entertainer and a long-established one at that; his ability to hit high-notes was far from the gist of it), and that Ellington was "sui generis" (of its own kind) means in this context -- what? So an article that arguably is off base in two of its three key examples is worthy of citation? I'd say that the article primarily is evidence that articles of that time from such sources are of dubious value, in and of themselves. Take an article like that as a point of provocation if you wish, but then go and do the difficult work yourself, insofar as that's possible. (Again, see Gushee's book on the Creole Jazz Band for examples of what can be discovered and verified under far more difficult scholarly circumstances.) Also, in the DB article's longish list of black bands that were "practically out of the picture as far as the general public is concerned," I see no mention of Erskine Hawkins' very popular 'Bama State Collegians ("Tuxedo Junction" and "After Hours" were big hits). In one sense I can see why the author of that 1940 article might choose to ignore Hawkins' band -- its music had a proto-R&B flavor and almost certainly appealed more to black audiences of the time than to white ones (but a good deal to both), and the same could be said of Louis Jordan's Tympany Five a short ways further down the road. But the way he handles this article also suggests to me that DeVeaux isn't looking carefully enough at the not always straightforward realities of the cultural/racial marketplace of that era -- either that or he is looking at that marketplace only for evidence (in this case, I would say, "evidence") that suits his thesis. I haven't read DeVeaux's "Constructing the Jazz Tradition," but the book that includes it is on its way to me.

Could be both.

Sorry -- I meant "... when Ornette said that Trane was 'lost to sequences''... etc.

I think that when Ornette said that Trane "lost to sequences," he meant that Trane was too absorbed in them, or too enamored of them, for his own musical good -- not at all that he was "lost" to them as in not knowing where he was in the form. To say that would be absurd.

Hey, you two, it's a floor polish and a dessert topping! Larry, I understand your discomfort if you feel a jazz historian has set out with a predetermined conclusion and is somehow fitting "the facts" (a fuzzy area in jazz or any other history) to match his or her predetermined conclusion. I haven't read enough of the Gennari yet to comment in that regard (hoping to get back to it next week when I go on vacation), but for me a big problem with pre-NJS jazz history is that it so blithely ignores contextualization (outside of some fine early efforts--see Finkelstein--and some rather shrill ones--see Kofsky). I guess some of this boils down to how one sees art; and while I'm not a Marxist, I think that music, or any other art form, for that matter, is rarely simply "about itself." Nor do I think that an artist is always consciously aware of how those social/economic/political influences may be shaping his or her work. I'm sure Roscoe Mitchell didn't sit down to write an Afrocentric manifesto--and there are folks here with direct experience of that time--but how can any discussion of the AACM take place outside of what was going on in the 1960s? Perhaps some of the NJS writers do go too far in an attempt to overcompensate for the previous deficit to which I alluded--or perhaps some are indeed motivated by the dread academia disease of forcing a "new" viewpoint. For me, they've brought something refreshing and new to the conversation. I fell in love with jazz because of the "music itself," but as I got more into it, I became more and more fascinated by the music's relationship with the times/history/places from whence it came. NJS explores much of that in a way that I haven't seen much of before. To take Deveaux's book, for instance, had anybody else ever suggested that the difficulties black big bands faced in touring--particularly the South--might have contributed to the small-group format which bop favored? Maybe somebody had--and anyway, that's surely not the whole story, but I don't think that Deveaux was suggesting that it was. We've just already had so much "Great Men of Jazz" history that posits bebop as having arrived from the winged messengers of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I won't contest Bird's genius or the enormous impact that his breakthrough had, but there was more to the story than that--even geniuses don't come out of a void. I'll have to go back and reread Deveaux, in light of what you've posted here. And I greatly look forward to reading your expanded take on Gennari in the Annual. I wouldn't argue with any of the above, but I would strongly argue against the notion that race and racism had nothing at all to do with the music, and would say that such an attitude is a form of blindness itself. Ghost -- I understand what you're saying, but a couple of things (though I don't want talk out my response to Gennari's book and what I think lies behind it before I actually do the thinking and writing). First, I know Finkelstein's book, and while his Marxist take gets a bit too schematic at times IMO, he would just scream at the way today's NJS contextualizers so often throw out the aesthetic baby with the bathwater and/or proceed as though aesthetic details and one's valuations of the same are essentially determined by, and are primarly evidence of, social-economic-political interests at work. Finkelstein in effect argues back from whar are in his mind the more or less given aesthetic peaks of the music at its best to see, in the paths to those peaks, a "people's music" at work. But his argument is based both on the existence of, and on the high aesthetic valuation he places upon, the crystallized, detailed music of Armstrong, Parker, Ellington et al. -- with the crystallization and its musical details being of the essence. That is, in Finkelstein's view, a music that arguably that was "of the people" but had led to nothing on the order, aesthetically, of "Potato Head Blues" or Ellington's "Ko Ko," or Parker's "Embraceable You" would not be worth talking about in the way that jazz is. I see a lot in NJS-style contextualization that runs directly counter to this. About "the notion that race and racism had nothing at all to do with the music ... is a form of blindness itself," I would agree. But again, no one I don't think is saying that race and racism have "nothing at all to do with the music" -- I'm saying that the path from the effects of racism, or feelings about race and racism (and a whole lot of other injuries and interests) to specific musical choices and the way one values the results of those choices is nowhere near as schematic as the NJS approach typically tries to make it -- further, that once we get into the realm of crystallized musical choices, factors that arguably are specifically musical tend to loom very large in the minds of people who actually are musicians and in the minds of like-minded listeners. Which is not to say that one can't or shouldn't read backwards from those crystallized choices into all those other social-political-economic realms as freely and as honestly as you can (as Finkelstein, for one, tries to do). But don't forget (Finkelstein doesn't) that once crystallization into art occurs, one has entered a somewhat different world, and that to take what has been crystallized there as mere evidence is doing neither those crystallized choices nor yourself a favor. Finally, IIRC that part of the book, I thought that DeVeaux's "suggestion that the difficulties black big bands faced in touring--particularly the South--might have contributed to the small-group format which bop favored" was, in Allen Lowe's words, a "typical after-the-fact political rationalization." There are so many other more obvious reasons for bop's favoring "the small-group format," and the way DeVeaux's suggestion bolsters his larger thesis -- eh. For an example of truly disinterested and fittingly detailed jazz scholarship at work, check our Lawrence Gushee's recent book about the Creole Jazz Band. Fascinating in itself, it's also a fine (and sadly rare) example of what non-tendentious jazz scholarship can be like.

Don't know if we're thinking of two different books because the "Jazz on Record" I know came out in 1968 -- "Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917-1967" --stuff from Max Harrison, Charles Fox, Eric Thacker, Jack Cooke (I believe), Michael James, Ronald Atkins, Paul Oliver, Alun Morgan (all Jazz Monthly people). IMO it's among the best seat of the pants jazz criticism there is. I can't find my copy any more, sad to say. Even better (because the entries are longer and focus on single recordings) if you can find a copy, is the second book from this crowd: "Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, 1945-70."

I'm in the midst of re-reading, so I can't at the moment sort out my memories of what Gennari said on this from other things I've read and heard over the years, but IIRC correctly he pretty much endorses the notion (to take one key example) that the avant garde music of the '60s (I'm painting with a broad brush using that term) was essentially an expression of Black Militant and/or Afro-centric ideas and feelings. At the time, I never felt that that was the case in the sense that there was much if any direct link between those ideas and feelings and the actual musical ideas (or perhaps I should say the most striking and potent ones) being produced at that time. I have recent second-hand testimony, from someone who participated in a panel discussion with him, that Roscoe Mitchell, when asked about this, said tersely, "It was about the music" or words to that effect. That's good enough for me.

I have a Lamont Johnson on Master Scores, "242 E. 3rd," the address of Slugs, that has a nice gutty feel to it. Jimmy Greene, Howard Johnson (on tuba, and he gets a lot of solo space), Don Sickler, Lonnie Plaxico, Tim Ries (on alto flute) Marcus Baylor (drums, a good player who was new to me), and Danny Sadownick, congas. Rec. 1998.

I'm told there are photographs.