John Gennari's BLOWIN' HOT & COOL

[Larry Kart]

when did "Really the Blues" come out? Whatever it's problems, it shows another way.

***

fragmented--

c l em

ent

ine

"Really the Blues" came out in 1946. What would Mezzrow's other way be -- play the clarinet badly but convince Panassie that you are an excellent jazz musician, be a great "weed" connection, and identify with blackness to the extent that you believe your own skin gets darker the longer you live in Harlem?

Don't think it's at all likely that Kazin would have known who Max Roach was in 1949, maybe ever. He lived in a different world. Haven't looked at "Walker in the City" in some time, but I'd guess that Kazin's failure of imagination/observation when he returned to the Brooklyn of his boyhood was because the loss of HIS Brooklyn was looming so large in his mind.

[AllenLowe]

interesting, as my late father grew up in Brownsville, and would have been the same age as Max, and went to the same High School - Boys High - I never thought to ask him; Brownsville, even when the Jews were there, was dirt poor, and it produced the Jewish mafia, Murder Inc - Lepke, etc. There is a great book of short stories I have at home, I Come From Brownsville, and it's a brutal book, and a lot of that explains my father's strangeness; the writer, whose name escpaes me, was Jewish and the neighborhood was violent and dangerous, a class and not a race issue, primarily, of course.

Edited September 20, 2006 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

I actually have a collection of Meyer Shapiro's writing somewhere - amazing and insightful guy. And I will disagree with Larry here, somewhat, about Mezzrow (actually, Larry, I'm only doing this to disprove Yanow's post in that other thread that I cannot disaggree with anyone without calling them an idiot) - but I like the recordings from the Revolutionary Blues period.....

you idiot!

geez, Larry, guess Yanow was right -

[Larry Kart]

no no, take off those jazz crit ears, Larry! i'm not interested in his music per se here. Mezz = specific expression of cross-cultural empathy in advance of many; not first, & not exclusively by any means but popular proof, had Kazin paid attn, that black folks were individuals too. Kazin's no dummy & "Walker" has virtues but also many flaws, not all of which fall under judging people out of time...

it's later pub. dates but note place of Bird/Diz in Selby "Last Exit" ('64) & Sorrentino "Steelwork" ('70), set in '50s & re: "Koko," mid-40s respectively.

where Kazin & others irk me (& this goes back to Hammond hagiography AND crit), is making these imperious criticial pronouncements oblivious to own parochialism. RW's "Native Son," as you know, was huge book but Kazin's no pop guy in any way-- film, music, famous Murder Inc. crime trials all lost to him then... alas.

c

Clem -- I'm not interested in his music either. As for the rest, wasn't Mezz's "cross-cultural empathy" (based on my memories of "Really The Blues" and what I've heard otherwise about his behavior in this realm) kind of creepy, even abject? For instance, I believe that his closeness to the celebrated jazz people he was close to rested heavily on his role as a reliable, generous source for top-quality marijuana, and that this in fact was why Mezz adopted that role. If that is at all true, and you were the one being empathized with in this manner, how would you regard the would-be empathizer?

[AllenLowe]

sorry to interject, but I'm not aware the Mezz was disliked - I do believe, from what I can remember, that Dan Morgenstern has fond memories of him - there are liner notes by Dan to a reissue of some French recordings, I think, and I might have them at home - also, I think Mezzrow's wife was African American, which, if I am remembering correctly, takes the issue to another level -

[Larry Kart]

sorry to interject, but I'm not aware the Mezz was disliked - I do believe, from what I can remember, that Dan Morgenstern has fond memories of him - there are liner notes by Dan to a reissue of some French recordings, I think, and I might have them at home - also, I think Mezzrow's wife was African American, which, if I am remembering correctly, takes the issue to another level -

That's OK. I could be misinformed or be mis-remembering.

[Larry Kart]

oh, I myself like some Mezz just dandy-- I only wanted to focus on achievement of "Really the Blues." any writing of self & other is perilous but I think Mezz did better than most in his time. Not criticism but Larry, I reckon yr not a stoner? Me neither but I've been around everyone doing everything & that's life: no shame there w/Mezz's interests, love, friendships, nor (mere) reductionism.

this goes back to those who cut Kazin slack for his specific judeo-literary provincialism: that was his choice, limitation, not only option.(& I still like Dahlberg better.)

c

Never really a stoner, Clem, and haven't indulged at all that way in maybe 35 years. Occured to me that it had stopped being fun, for me.

At one time I read all the Dahlberg I could find, and I still have those books. Was recently reading a selection of C. Olson's letters, and there's one where he and Dahlberg, a onetime mentor, get crosswise that's very intense and moving -- in part because Olson is in the role he's in (and trying to break away from it).

[montg]

I'm reviewing it for the Annual of the Institute of Jazz Studies' "Annual Review of Jazz Studies." Upside of that, from my point of view, is that I get all the space I need, and I think I'll need a good deal -- there's a lot about this book, the first time through, that left me with doubts and suspicions. Downside of writing a review for the "Annual" etc. is that it won't appear for more than a year and won't be seen by that many people.

Now you have me curious!! What kinds of doubts and suspicions? The particulars, the broader themes, or both?

I guess I gleaned two points from the book. One, the meaning of jazz is important for a lot of people--historically, a lot has been invested in creating a meaning for the term.

And second, every generation or so there has been an innovation, a reaction, and then a broadening synthesis and consensus on what jazz means. At least until the late sixties, when consensus seemed to no longer be possible, which brought about the current divisiveness (Lincoln Center and all that). There just seems to be no way to synthesize John Zorn and Wynton Marsalis into some coherent meaning of jazz.

[Larry Kart]

I've read it, and while I like some of it (the parts that deal with Martin Williams especially), it has grave faults IMO, especially as Gennari gets closer to the present. In particular, there's the implicit assumption (it gets explicit at several points) that attitudes toward the music, and of course the alleged interests of the those who formulate and promulgate those attitudes, essentially shape the course of music --or do so far more than the other way around. Such thinking seems me to be a hallmark of DeVeaux and the new jazz studies folk (that's not what they call themselves, but I forget what they do call themselves), and to me it's at once intelligent-dumb (if you know what I mean) and pernicious -- the latter because, among other things, it so easily boils down to a form of power-mongering itself. That is, you critically explore (which in practice usually means "expose") the interests (or "interests") of a John Hammond, a Leonard Feather, a Martin Williams et al., and it's you who get to say that their views are or are not little more than those interests in action, as though that were the only option. Like so much academic stuff, it's scholarship in the name of seizing and wielding the whip hand.

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. And this is not just a matter of the difference between what one experiences (or thinks one has experienced) directly versus the cooler, wiser, necessarily less-direct scholarly approach. Instead, it's mostly a matter of covert power interests at work, as in that old creepy story about the family (husband, wife, young daughter) who go to visit the Paris World's Fair in the 1880s, I think. They arrive at their hotel, check in, the daughter is feeling a bit under the wather, the mother stays with her while dad goes out for a long walk. When he gets back to the hotel several hours later, 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. (BTW, what happens in the story, most of which focuses of the man's mounting sense of panic and unreality, is that the daughter became quite sick while the father was out for his walk, a doctor was called in, discovered that the girl had cholera -- news that would have emptied Paris during the World's Fair if it were allowed to get out -- so mother and daughter were whisked away by the arthorities to a suburban clinic, and all evidence that there had been a room there was erased. Also, does anyone know who wrote that story? I may want to refer to it, and Olson simply says it's a "Bulldog Drummond mystery," which may be the case but maybe not.)

[AllenLowe]

hey Larry - pardon my ignorance here, but I've definitely slept through some of the academic developments in jazz studies (reminds me of that old Groucho Marx line when, as president of the university, he decides to sell the dormitories. "Where will the students sleep?" someone asks. "Where they always sleep, " Goucho replies, "in the classrooms.")

but, anyway, can you define NJS?

thanks -

[Nate Dorward]

Larry: sounds a bit like the plot of the film So Long at the Fair--based on the same story?

[Larry Kart]

Allen: I'll be able to a better job of defining NJS later on, but the gist of it so far seems to be so-called "contextualization" -- (placing and leaving jazz within a framework of social, political, economic, etc. interests), with the flux of these interests, rather than aesthetic matters (or what some might call "the music itself"), essentially determining the course of the music over time. In other words, as I see it, jazz becomes a symptom, and/or evidence of larger and (by implication) more important forces at work. Thus, to pick one key example, in Scott DeVeaux's "The Birth of Bebop" IIRC the driving force behind that music is said to be the desire of black musicians who were oppressed or disadvantaged by the white social hegemony of the Swing Era and its big bands to create a new music that would give them more control over the means of production, etc. It's fairly clear what acts, and what ex post facto statements about what was going on at Mintons and elsewhere, DeVeaux is bouncing off of here, but IMO there are really big gaps in this kind of thinking. For one, supposing it's true that Gillespie, Parker et al. were determined, up front and primarily, to make a music that was theirs alone and couldn't be "stolen." Why then did they come up with this specific music, with its quite specific and quite potent and striking MUSICAL traits? Where are the (IMO necessary, no matter which direction you want to take it) links between the supposedly originating socio-political-economic impulses of bebop and the actual sound of "Night in Tunisia" or "Scrapple from the Apple"? DeVeaux is a very smart guy, and perhaps my account irons out the subtleties of his argument, but that's how I remember the gist what he says. If it's an ass-backwards approach to the music, I don't think, given DeVeaux's intelligence, that it's that way by accident.

[AllenLowe]

I agree, and I did find Deveaux's book interesting, especially as he offered a more systematic approach to jazz historicism - HOWEVER, and this is a big HOWEVER, and is what you are getting at, I think: the real truth is that music changes in response to many things, but major aesthetic/artistic changes like bebop are primarily related to prior forms having exhausted - or at least seeming to have exhausted - their creative possibilities. This happens even in the most commercial of art forms, I think, and can be seen everywhere along the line, from country music to blues -

contextualization is great, but I'm always amused at how, after going through certain academic acrobatics, musical evaluations really don't change - the music is the music is the music, I've always thought. HOWEVER (once again) a truly good writer/critic/historian will use contextualization to illuminate aesthetic matters, and can thus help on that side. The bigger problem relates to the demands of academia; as one well-known writer/Yale prof said to me years ago, "you know why they write that way - they have to justify the academic acceptance of the subject, so they re-state the obvious in more complicated terms."

Edited September 22, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Nate Dorward]

Allen--whatever the merits & demerits of DeVeaux's book, I thought it was written clearly & was admirably free of the numbing linguistic counter-shuffling that is the bane of jazz-studies books and papers. -- Should also point out that DeVeaux's book is rather skeptical about Mary Lou Williams' reported quote from Monk about creating "a music they can't steal" (see p.351).

[AllenLowe]

I've always been suspicious of that quote (and others to the same effect) as after-the-fact.

All I know is that in my many conversations with Al Haig (and he was a close friend) he never expressed that feeling about the music, or indicated that he was ever in any way considered an outsider. He was definitely a disciple (he told me Dizzy showed him not only the chords but the voicings) but than so were a lot of people in his relative position, black and white. And it's a moot point, ultimately, as there were so many white beboppers, who could steal away -

[Larry Kart]

I agree, and I did find Deveaux's book interesting, especially as he offered a more systematic approach to jazz historicism - HOWEVER, and this is a big HOWEVER, and is what you are getting at, I think: the real truth is that music changes in response to many things, but major aesthetic/artistic changes like bebop are primarily related to prior forms having exhausted - or at least seeming to have exhausted - their creative possibilities. This happens even in the most commercial of art forms, I think, and can be seen everywhere along the line, from country music to blues -

contextualization is great, but I'm always amused at how, after going through certain academic acrobatics, musical evaluations really don't change - the music is the music is the music, I've always thought. HOWEVER (once again) a truly good writer/critic/historian will use contextualization to illuminate aesthetic matters, and can thus help on that side. The bigger problem relates to the demands of academia; as one well-known writer/Yale prof said to me years ago, "you know why they write that way - they have to justify the academic acceptance of the subject, so they re-state the obvious in more complicated terms."

Rather than, or as much as, "prior forms having exhausted - or at least seeming to have exhausted - their creative possibilities," I think it's a matter of prior forms stimulating/suggesting new creative possibilities to the right receptive/talented people. Ornette might be the classic example -- "Ancient To the Future" as the Art Ensemble put it. And the line between Armstrong and Parker, especially rhythmically, seems fairly direct after the fact, though probably much less beforehand.

About the academic need to restate the obvious, and above all cite it from "sources," there's a minor comic (at least to me) example of this on p. 81 of Gennari's book, when he's talking about the earnest Columbia U. undergrad jazz fans of the late 1930s who were on their way to become critics of some note -- Barry Ulanov, Ralph De Toledano et al. Gennari includes an innocuous fairly cheesy, in a light features-story manner, potted account of their activities -- info that Gennari could simply state himself because it's so obvious -- but instead he presents it in the form of a quote from a 2001 article in a Columbia U. alumni magazine! This when it's crystal clear that the author of the article has no special knowledge to impart but is simply a features writer recycling stuff from an old clip file and pouring a little human interest sauce on top, if in fact the sauce wasn't already there in the clips. But it's a citation.

[AllenLowe]

I do think that you often get musicians who feel that the style they've been trained in - like bebop - has become something of a straitjacket - like Paul Bley, for example, or Coltrane, who needed to expand and go on. Of course, someone like Ornette is particularly unique - just a genius who heard things in a new way, and it's unlikley that he was ever a bebopper in any way, shape, or form, though bebop was, I think, an important frame of reference for him. Maybe it's the tension between the various factors - the old forms as played by musicians who feel like they've played all they can play, the new ideas that the old forms inspire, the visionaries who just hear things in different ways or who see different relationships between traditional elements, who see them fitting together in new ways. Jaki Byard was another guy who said that by the middle 1950s he'd done as much as he could do with bebop and had to keep doing new things to keep himself interested. Ditto Mingus. In theater you have similar things happening (though you might not know it to look at contemporary plays) - by the middle 1950s the worn out gestures of the typical realistic/social play gave way to Becett/Waiting for Godot, which (though not historically alone) had a revolutionary effect, working as it did with still relatively traditional elements like scen and language, but transforming them so entirely. It does seem that certain forms just hit a wall and that the most curious artists tend to try and find ways around or over that wall - and jazz consumes itself particularly quickly, as musicians play so much and so continually that it demands freshness and renewal in ever-quickening cycles.

Edited September 22, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

Larry: sounds a bit like the plot of the film So Long at the Fair--based on the same story?

Good work, Nate. Apparently that film, which I vaguely recall seeing, is based either on a true incident or an urban legend. Perhaps this is the factual germ, so to speak, of the matter:

"Vienna's reputation [not Paris's, note] also did not improve as a result of the [1873 World's] fair. The site itself wasn't even ready when the exposition was officially opened, adding to the view of Austria as a perpetually unprepared country. Days after the opening ceremony, the Viennese stock market crashed, causing a depression and severe unemployment. There was also an outbreak of CHOLERA [my emphasis] during the summer of the fair, and a flood that damaged buildings towards the end. This, and the fact that vendors were charging high prices for their goods and services, discouraged visitors from coming to the exposition. Vienna never held another world fair after 1873."

[Larry Kart]

Allen--whatever the merits & demerits of DeVeaux's book, I thought it was written clearly & was admirably free of the numbing linguistic counter-shuffling that is the bane of jazz-studies books and papers. -- Should also point out that DeVeaux's book is rather skeptical about Mary Lou Williams' reported quote from Monk about creating "a music they can't steal" (see p.351).

I'll certainly be looking at DeVeaux again, but as I said or implied before, his intelligence and relatively jargon-free prose IMO make his work all the more troublesome in the end because the underlying hardcore interest-mongering, while near omnipresent, is nicely disguised as disinterested inquiry. The books are still being cooked but discreetly so. You might say that DeVeaux is the John McCain of the New Jazz Studies movement.

[montg]

[i] I've read it, and while I like some of it (the parts that deal with Martin Williams especially), it has grave faults IMO, especially as Gennari gets closer to the present. In particular, there's the implicit assumption (it gets explicit at several points) that attitudes toward the music, and of course the alleged interests of the those who formulate and promulgate those attitudes, essentially shape the course of music --or do so far more than the other way around. Such thinking seems me to be a hallmark of DeVeaux and the new jazz studies folk (that's not what they call themselves, but I forget what they do call themselves), and to me it's at once intelligent-dumb (if you know what I mean) and pernicious -- the latter because, among other things, it so easily boils down to a form of power-mongering itself. That is, you critically explore (which in practice usually means "expose") the interests (or "interests") of a John Hammond, a Leonard Feather, a Martin Williams et al., and it's you who get to say that their views are or are not little more than those interests in action, as though that were the only option. Like so much academic stuff, it's scholarship in the name of seizing and wielding the whip hand.

This reminds me of the nature-nurture issue in psychology. Is change/development largely the product of cultural/environmental forces or is change produced by natural and organic forces intrinsic to the individual.

Applied to the music, does jazz change largely because of the nature of the music itself or do cultural forces somehow compel the change.

I'm trying to think, from the perspective of a layperson and a naive one at that, where culture may have had somewhat of an active hand in moving the music. Maybe Lincoln Center and the cultural climate of the 80s mandated a change, so the path the music took was not really an organic one? Maybe some of the Black militancy in the late 60s and early 70s was awkwardly grafted into the music?

[Larry Kart]

This reminds me of the nature-nurture issue in psychology. Is change/development largely the product of cultural/environmental forces or is change produced by natural and organic forces intrinsic to the individual.

Applied to the music, does jazz change largely because of the nature of the music itself or do cultural forces somehow compel the change.

I'm trying to think, from the perspective of a layperson and a naive one at that, where culture may have had somewhat of an active hand in moving the music. Maybe Lincoln Center and the cultural climate of the 80s mandated a change, so the path the music took was not really an organic one? Maybe some of the Black militancy in the late 60s and early 70s was awkwardly grafted into the music?

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.

[AllenLowe]

once again it's like the typical after-the-fact political rationalization - same as with the bebop quote about making something white guys could not steal. That's good to hear, Larry, because it further puts the contextualizers in their place. I've always said that most musicians, on the level of creation and pleasure, are color blind - there's an interview with Bobby Bland in which he talks about how much he loved Hank Williams and the Grand Ol Opry; and lets not forget how influentual Konitz and Tristano were on the 2nd generation of avant gardists; Julius Hemphill was particulary forthright in this, always talking about how Konitz made him understand that there were other way to play, outside of typical bebop lines -

not to mention how much Jelly Roll Morton liked opera, and how much Armstrong liked the whole run of pop music -

Edited September 23, 2006 by AllenLowe

[ghost of miles]

Allen: I'll be able to a better job of defining NJS later on, but the gist of it so far seems to be so-called "contextualization" -- (placing and leaving jazz within a framework of social, political, economic, etc. interests), with the flux of these interests, rather than aesthetic matters (or what some might call "the music itself"), essentially determining the course of the music over time. In other words, as I see it, jazz becomes a symptom, and/or evidence of larger and (by implication) more important forces at work.

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.

[ghost of miles]

once again it's like the typical after-the-fact political rationalization - same as with the bebop quote about making something white guys could not steal. That's good to hear, Larry, because it further puts the contextualizers in their place. I've always said that most musicians, on the level of creation and pleasure, are color blind - there's an interview with Bobby Bland in which he talks about how much he loved Hank Williams and the Grand Ol Opry; and lets not forget how influentual Konitz and Tristano were on the 2nd generation of avant gardists; Julius Hemphill was particulary forthright in this, always talking about how Konitz made him understand that there were other way to play, outside of typical bebop lines -

not to mention how much Jelly Roll Morton liked opera, and how much Armstrong liked the whole run of pop music -

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.

[Larry Kart]

Allen: I'll be able to a better job of defining NJS later on, but the gist of it so far seems to be so-called "contextualization" -- (placing and leaving jazz within a framework of social, political, economic, etc. interests), with the flux of these interests, rather than aesthetic matters (or what some might call "the music itself"), essentially determining the course of the music over time. In other words, as I see it, jazz becomes a symptom, and/or evidence of larger and (by implication) more important forces at work.

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.

once again it's like the typical after-the-fact political rationalization - same as with the bebop quote about making something white guys could not steal. That's good to hear, Larry, because it further puts the contextualizers in their place. I've always said that most musicians, on the level of creation and pleasure, are color blind - there's an interview with Bobby Bland in which he talks about how much he loved Hank Williams and the Grand Ol Opry; and lets not forget how influentual Konitz and Tristano were on the 2nd generation of avant gardists; Julius Hemphill was particulary forthright in this, always talking about how Konitz made him understand that there were other way to play, outside of typical bebop lines -

not to mention how much Jelly Roll Morton liked opera, and how much Armstrong liked the whole run of pop music -

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.