John Gennari's BLOWIN' HOT & COOL

[Simon Weil]

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."

If you could find parallel use of words to "shrewdly" or "tellingly" only used negatively (say "innocent" or "crass" or whatever) about people in the past that would be handy in making your point. Or maybe it's just implicit. It's a platitude to say that we are wised up to contextualization now. I mean that's just the cultural trend of the last 40 odd years. The bigger question is does it make us wiser now - and in what areas? I'd have a job believing that Martin Williams, for all his flaws, wasn't a greater critic than Gennari.

Anyway, I've ordered this book - so I guess in 2 or 3 weeks I should have my 2p's worth to add. I'd want to know how he deals with Stanley Crouch, who seems to be an example of us not being wiser now. In fact he seems to be a sort of Jazz fundamentalist whose relentless agenda-driven certainty is a reaction to the institutionalisation of doubt that underlies much of the deconstructive movement.

Boiing boiing, whir, splat.

Simon Weil

Edited September 27, 2006 by Simon Weil

[AllenLowe]

Ghost - with all due respect I think you are missing the point - I love books that truly dig deeply into the sociology of music - the problem - and it is a BIG problem - is that the ones I read, particularly from academics, make bizarre and unforgiveable errors over and over. The most frequent reason is ideology and theory, a desire to fit the facts into the theory instead of the other way around - let's take Sherry Tucker, a perfect examople - in her book Swing Shift she talks about Billie Holiday going to California and trying to record with a very rough sounding, African American women's big band. She points out how Holiday was uncomfortable wit their accompaniment, and how Holiday kept asking them why they could not play like the Paul Whiteman band, with whom she had just recorded for Capitol Records. Tucker cites this as meaning that Holiday was ashamed of being black - OUCH - here we go - because Tucker does not understand that, for Holiday, this was an AESTHETIC issue - she liked a softer, less obtrusive background - she jumps at the chance to fit this into a social/ideological framework. Personally I find this a particularly repulsive example of academic/NJS perversion of the facts. But this kind of error is distressingly common.

Or Cathy Ogren's book on Jazz in the 1920s - she cites the title of the song Ballin the Jack as having sexual reference - which it does not - that's just plain academic ignorance -

or that other book - sorry, name and author escape me, I'll have to look it up, though I do cite it in my jazz history - who tells us, ina book written in the 1980s, of how Bessie Smith died because they would not admit her to a white hospital!

Such approaches can be done well, and off the top of my head the ones I can think of who have done so are John Szwed, Larry Gushee (read his book on the Original Creole Band), Lewis Porter, Bill Russell - usually but not always musicians or former players who have actually spent some time witht he real musicians, though that, of course, does not guarantee results. Dan Morgenstern also rights very well with a true understanding of the social context(s) - it's just that there are so many bad books; I wish I could cite more, but I usually throw them against the wall - but name a few titles and it may refresh my memory -

Edited September 27, 2006 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

let me add, to support another of Larry's ponts - about having experienced something and than seeing it distorted as history - that I have known (some better than others) quite a few of the older generation of beboppers, most now dead -Schildkraut, Al Haig, Curley Russell, Tommmy Potter, Howard McGhee, Joe Albany, Duke Jordan, Harold Ashby (who was sort of in-between), Skinny Burgan (great bass player), Bill Triglia, Jimmy Knepper, Jaki Byard - and one after another they have told me, if not always in so many words, about how warped they felt most of the accounts they had read about the bebop era were, not all by academics, but many that were intended as scholarly works. It wasn't just the occasional objection that they made, it was a basic theme that seemed to run through their comments, and this was why it often took a while for me to befriend them, as they distrusted nearly anyone that they felt wanted to write about them in an historical sense. They just felt that everything they read bore little or no relationship to the life as they had lived it - teh truth is that they desired particularly to talk about the music itself, because that was what motivated them - their joy at playing it, their love of hearing and playing it, their love for the life itself and the freedom it offered them. I never see this reflected in an academic book -

Edited September 27, 2006 by AllenLowe

[ghost of miles]

I don't think I'm missing anybody's point but Chuck's (an issue, whatever it is, that I'm not going to discuss in this forum). I think it's surely safe to say that we all desire honest, rigorous scholarship when it comes to history and/or attempts to reconstruct it. Jazz history, regrettably, has been littered with error and myth, much of it committed by overzealous fans who never went never a university. Your remarks about the beboppers are interesting, because (if I understand your previous posts on Org. correctly) much of your association with them came in the 1970s and 1980s, long before NJS had even arrived on the scene. I'm sure these guys did get burned, but it couldn't have been at the hands of NJS writers. And one of the people you mention (Howard McGhee) was a primary source for THE BIRTH OF BEBOP--Deveuax befriended him and spent a great deal of time with him.

I don't have Tucker's SWING SHIFT on hand--I'm still at the office--but I do have Ogren's book here, and I disagree with your representation of what she's saying. She talks about it quite clearly as a dance (a rather lascivious and notorious one at that) and the alleged origin of the term in late-19th-century African-American railroad labor. She then concludes with, "...slang allowed other meanings that were less technological and more physiological." No kidding! The primary fault I find there is an obviousness so apparent that I'm not sure she even needed to state it. Take away that line of thought & you drain the juices out of about two thousand old blues songs.

If one wants to play "Gotcha!" with NJS, by all means, go ahead, but I could sit down with any # of books, some of them by writers that we all esteem, and find all sorts of similar intellectual renderings, guesswork, and shaky leaps in logic. In fact, part of what I've seen as the mission of NJS is to apply a kind of unsentimental discipline that jazz history has all too often lacked. Like you, I prefer to read it when done by people who genuinely love the music (I count Deveaux among them), because that's how I approach it too--and when it's done accurately and well, by somebody like Steve Isoardi or Deveaux, it gives the musicians the very humanity that you say previous writers--academic or otherwise--have stripped away. It's not perfect, by any means, and it's not the only way of approaching jazz history. I've found enough revelations in its better efforts, though, to be glad that it's here, and I look forward to future efforts. (Just as I'm very much looking forward to the literary successor to THAT DEVILIN' TUNE.) And yes, based on your & Larry's recs, I'm ordering the Gushee book right now.

Edited September 28, 2006 by ghost of miles

[Chuck Nessa]

I guess these days it is important to judge music by current books.

[Chuck Nessa]

I think it's a crime folks who were there are shoved to the side in order to fit the philosophies of authors.

Crimes in the name of "art" distort history beyond anything I can imagine.

[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.

[ghost of miles]

I think it's a crime folks who were there are shoved to the side in order to fit the philosophies of authors.

Tell it to Steve Isoardi and all of the musicians he interviewed for CENTRAL AVENUE SOUNDS (they, in fact, tell the story--it's an oral history). Tell it to Deveaux and his friend Howard McGhee. Who's getting shoved to the side to fit the philosophy of who here? Sherri Tucker went out and interviewed dozens and dozens of women swing musicians from WWII, most of whom had never been approached by anybody else. Are you going to cast her book on the bonfire because you've read some negative comments & decided that NJS stinks? Fine--there goes a lot of history that would've otherwise been unrecorded.

Crimes in the name of "art" distort history beyond anything I can imagine.

Huh, I thought it was crimes in the name of "ideology" that was the Big Problem here. I say to-MAY-to, you say to-MAH-to. I guess in the end we all get our "truth" differently. If you can make race, racism, economic pressures, and everything else cultural vanish from the history of 20th century jazz, let alone art, congratulations. That's not what you're saying, I suppose, but I don't know what you are saying, beyond a distilled rehash of other folks' critical remarks.

I guess these days it is important to judge music by current books.

(insert metaphorical throwing up of hands in exasperation)

Whoever said anything about judging music by books? Current or otherwise? I don't go running to David Rosenthal's HARD BOP (1992) to tell me what to think about whatever Lee or Jackie I'm listening to. I don't go running to Finkelstein's JAZZ: A PEOPLE'S MUSIC (1948) to tell me what to think about whatever Louis I'm listening to. I'm not going to go running to Deveaux's THE BIRTH OF BEBOP (1998) to tell me what to think about the Hawk or Howard McGhee that I'm listening to. I'm not going to go running to Gennari's BLOWIN' HOT & COOL (2006) to tell me what to think about whatever Sam Rivers record that I'm listening to. Damned if I'm not afraid, though, to learn more about the culture & times from which all of that music emerged, and to augment the listening experience with history of all sorts. Not like that's some sort of g.d. heroic act, but apparently it's some sort of heretical one, judging from the tone of your posts. I mean, if you want to go the late-Coltrane no-text route and say, "No liner notes--let the music speak entirely for itself," be my guest, but I for one sure enjoyed and benefitted from reading the notes by Larry Kart and Jim Sangrey that accompanied the ALL MUSIC cd. What kind of writing about music isn't "contextualization"? All due respect to those who would simply say, "Shut up and listen," but then if they really believed that, I doubt they'd be posting here.

Edited September 28, 2006 by ghost of miles

[Chuck Nessa]

Ghost, it seems you have dug a hole. Good luck and have a nice life.

I was in the middle of a 2 page response to your whining pm. Forget it. I don't care anymore.

Edited September 28, 2006 by Chuck Nessa

[ghost of miles]

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.

Actually, that just makes it sound more interesting to me, Larry. Just last night I read a review of Daniel Mendelsohn's THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION in the new NY Review of Books. The book's about Mendelsohn's attempt to learn the fate of six relatives murdered in the Holocaust, 60+years after the fact. (Link here.) In some ways what you're saying about Gushee's book makes me think about (& want to read) the Mendelsohn as well.

[ghost of miles]

Ghost, it seems you have dug a hole. Good luck and have a nice life.

I was in the middle of a 2 page response to your whining pm. Forget it. I don't care anymore.

Classy, Chuck. If you don't want to talk about it anymore, at least spare the rest of the board.

[Chuck Nessa]

Ghost, it seems you have dug a hole. Good luck and have a nice life.

I was in the middle of a 2 page response to your whining pm. Forget it. I don't care anymore.

Classy, Chuck. If you don't want to talk about it anymore, at least spare the rest of the board.

I did.

[Lazaro Vega]

Just a surprising note that after having read The Nation review, and not the book, that the Crouch/Murray “camp” is not countered by other critics of the time...Art Lang, Howard Mandall, Kevin Whitehead, John Corbett....are those guys in there? That seems a glaring omission as there was some counter voices, in terms of ideas and insight, to the louder critical tract.

[AllenLowe]

while it's true, Ghost, that the musicians I knew I knew best in the 1970s and 1980s, my main point was that academics tend to use unreliable techniques when trying to reconstruct hisotry - often because they do not know the music well, or have heard so little, or never knew any musicians. While it is true that Deveaux used McGhee as a prime source, there's a different question raised by this - of course McGhee is not going to complain about being the focus of a book about that era; I'm sure he was quite flattered. That doesn't mean that Deveaux did not make major miscalculation by using him and Hawkins as a focus - he did, and it distorts the whole book's perspective, in my opinion. But that's a separate issue.

Tucker's comments about Holiday, to me, make it impossible to take her seriously - even George Bush makes an intelligent comment once in a while; his OTHER comments,however, make it imnpossible for me to take him seriously. Same with Tucker.

As for Ogren, she is talking about the term "Ballin'", and it is not, in that song's context, a sexual reference, except to academics who are hopelssly out of it and trying to sound culturally aware, as she is.

Edited September 28, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Lazaro Vega]

Ballin the Jack is about going fast? Working hard?

[AllenLowe]

from the web (and this jibes witrh what I've been told):

"ball the jack was 'to perform (the dance step introduced in the song)'.

The usual sense of the expression, though, is 'to go fast; make haste', and this is often used in reference to railroad trains. This train-related use seems not to be the origin, however; jack 'a railroad locomotive' isn't found outside this phrase until later. (The phrase is verbal, which is why I said that it doesn't mean 'with great haste', but rather 'to do something with great haste'.) A slightly different sense is 'to work hard and efficiently'."

Edited September 28, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Lazaro Vega]

Thanks Allen.

You know until this discussion I thought putting music in context meant to place music in the historic AESTHETIC continuum. This other stuff is interesting, but the center of the discussion is the music, a discussion which is also swinging the other way now, too, in that unless you have a phd in music pedagogy with an emphasis on theory then what you write as a reviewer is discarded as mere opinion...

Re: Minton’s, Milt Hinton often talked about how he and Dizzy went up on the roof of the Cotton Club to work out different changes to “I Got Rhythm” to keep the lesser musicians out of the jam sessions. That's a story you can count on, and it is based, in his account, more on aesthetics than race or class.

And about the Creole Jazz Band book -- there are recordings by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, but perhaps we’re talking about the group Oliver led before Armstrong joined which didn't record?

[Larry Kart]

Just a surprising note that after having read The Nation review, and not the book, that the Crouch/Murray “camp” is not countered by other critics of the time...Art Lang, Howard Mandall, Kevin Whitehead, John Corbett....are those guys in there? That seems a glaring omission as there was some counter voices, in terms of ideas and insight, to the louder critical tract.

Only Mandel is mentioned of those guys, but that part of the book kind of dissolves into more or less inconsequential "can't we all get along" talk anyhow, plus the issue of Marsalis/Murray/Crouch/JLC is framed almost exclusively in racial terms. That bothers me less, though, than the air of "I just give up" that this final portion seems to radiate. For example, the final three sentences of the book are: "Jazz criticism ... is nothing less than the rowdy conversation that gives jazz its incisive edge in shaping the contours of America and New World modernity. Jazz criticism is the noise -- the auditory dissonance -- that gives the music cultural meaning. May the noise forever clamor, and may we listen and learn."

Sounds like a university president addressing the graduating class. BTW, I love "...the noise, the auditory dissonance...." It's like "the dirt, the unclean matter that soils."

[JSngry]

Geez, we've gotten heated here...

Music is music, sociology is sociology and always the twain shall meet in everyday life.

In books, though, I'm a little disturbed by the trend towards making the music about the sociology. God knows that's been the way it's went down more than a few times (and going back a loooong way), but although social forces can certainly stimulate the creation of music, they don't actually create it. That falls to the work of individuals who are, at their best, creative folk with tools and gifts that they'd have no matter what the stimuli. This tends to be downplayed these days, just as it was overplayed in the days when everybody was considered Mysitcal Supermortals. There weren't but a few of those. But let's not pretend that there weren't any, that they were all just responding to the forces of society. That's not an adequate explanation...

I guess for me the "truth" lies somewhere in between these two poles.

As usual.

[Larry Kart]

And about the Creole Jazz Band book -- there are recordings by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, but perhaps we’re talking about the group Oliver led before Armstrong joined which didn't record?

Gushee's book is about the seven-piece Creole Band -- whose best known members are Freddie Keppard, George Bacquet, Jimmy Noone, and bassist Bill Johnson -- that played vaudeville circuits from 1914-18, often to great acclaim, but made no recordings. Gushee's contention is that the the band -- given its likely high musical quality and high jazz content (considering who its members were and what the band's repertoire was), plus the fact that band usually was well-received (indeed often regarded as a sensation) by mass audiences across the country (they often played major vaudeville houses, remember, and often were headliners too) -- had a crucial impact in disseminating jazz. Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was a different bunch of guys, though the marvelous Bill Johnson would play with him, and came later.

[Larry Kart]

Sorry -- that's George Baquet.

[Lazaro Vega]

Thank you, Larry.

So, does the book include the Chicago writers witnessing the musicians of the AACM?

[Larry Kart]

So, does the book include the Chicago writers witnessing the musicians of the AACM?

No, not a word, except for mentioning that the late adolescent Howard Mandel went down to Hyde Park on weekends to hear some "head-changing" things. Then Mandel is said to have wondered "if the effect was all that different from when, during the same period, he took in concerts by the Jefferson Airplane, Vanilla Fudge, Jini Hendrix, Cream, the Doors, and other rock/pop acts."

[Simon Weil]

There is an extract from the Gennari book here. I find it a bit odd, in that he seems to have two sorts of style. There's his, rather engaging, storytelling:

In July 1935, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Leonard Feather set sail for New York for the first of two visits that year intended to spark his fledgling career as a jazz writer. Feather had cut his writing teeth apprenticing for German and French movie trade magazines, but for the previous eighteen months he had turned his focus to jazz, publishing articles in Britain’s Melody Maker, Gramophone, Tune Times, and Swing Music. Also a budding pianist and songwriter, Feather’s knowledge of jazz had come mainly through records. For European jazz cognoscenti of the 1930s, a pilgrimage to New York, the jazz recording capital, was de rigueur. As Feather relates in his 1987 autobiography, his first 1935 trip held especially great promise because of the person who was waiting for his ship to dock in New York harbor, ready to shepherd him around to the city’s jazz spots: John Hammond.

And then there's his analytic schtick:

Two young white men [Feather and Hammond] without dates, in a room full of good-timing cheer and ecstatic bodily release, position themselves between the musicians and the audience—here, in microcosm, was the Ur-stance of the jazz critic: poised on the seam between artistic creation and popular consumption, close to but also crucially distinct from the dancing mass body, caught up in an imagined sense of privileged intellectual and emotional communion with the music. Overlaying this subtle geography of inside/outside was both a self-consciousness about racial and class difference and a correspondingly self-justifying sense of exceptionalism, a conceit that the critic’s exalted purpose exempted him from the conventional patterns of cross-racial exchange.

Gennari seems to move pretty abruptly between the two, which makes this an odd concoction - in that no way does the preceding stuff justify the abrupt leaping to conclusions of "the Ur-stance of the jazz critic" lines. The problem is not that he leaps to a conclusion (he might have a point), but that by couching it in this analytic language, he presents it as kind of scholarly and disinterested. If he'd wanted to do that, the preceding paragraphs would have had to have been analytic casebuilding instead of storytelling.

I don't know...

Simon Weil

Edited September 29, 2006 by Simon Weil

[Larry Kart]

There is an extract from the Gennari book here. I find it a bit odd, in that he seems to have two sorts of style. There's his, rather engaging, storytelling:

In July 1935, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Leonard Feather set sail for New York for the first of two visits that year intended to spark his fledgling career as a jazz writer. Feather had cut his writing teeth apprenticing for German and French movie trade magazines, but for the previous eighteen months he had turned his focus to jazz, publishing articles in Britain’s Melody Maker, Gramophone, Tune Times, and Swing Music. Also a budding pianist and songwriter, Feather’s knowledge of jazz had come mainly through records. For European jazz cognoscenti of the 1930s, a pilgrimage to New York, the jazz recording capital, was de rigueur. As Feather relates in his 1987 autobiography, his first 1935 trip held especially great promise because of the person who was waiting for his ship to dock in New York harbor, ready to shepherd him around to the city’s jazz spots: John Hammond.

And then there's his analytic schtick:

Two young white men [Feather and Hammond] without dates, in a room full of good-timing cheer and ecstatic bodily release, position themselves between the musicians and the audience—here, in microcosm, was the Ur-stance of the jazz critic: poised on the seam between artistic creation and popular consumption, close to but also crucially distinct from the dancing mass body, caught up in an imagined sense of privileged intellectual and emotional communion with the music. Overlaying this subtle geography of inside/outside was both a self-consciousness about racial and class difference and a correspondingly self-justifying sense of exceptionalism, a conceit that the critic’s exalted purpose exempted him from the conventional patterns of cross-racial exchange.

Gennari seems to move pretty abruptly between the two, which makes this an odd concoction - in that no way does the preceding stuff justify the abrupt leaping to conclusions of "the Ur-stance of the jazz critic" lines. The problem is not that he leaps to a conclusion (he might have a point), but that by couching it in this analytic language, he presents it as kind of scholarly and disinterested. If he'd wanted to do that, the preceding paragraphs would have had to have been analytic casebuilding instead of storytelling.

I don't know...

Simon Weil

The latter quoted passage above, like much else of its sort on the book, is heavily informed (as they say) by New Jazz Studies-type thinking. For a real treat along those lines, check out the citation on page 398 from NJS maven Krin Gabbard about record collecting -- "...like all homosocial activities, a serious devotion to collecting may even hinder a man from acquiring the regular company of a sympathetic woman, and not just because so many record collectors end up with the unkempt look of the nerd...." Gennari himself then adds: ...."the stereotypical record collector struggles -- according to Gabbard and other scholars writing under the influence of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory -- with anxieties over the completeness of his maculine inventory. On this theory, the completist mode of collection ... is the displacement of an anxiety over the wholeness of the body (and of the psychosexual emotional balance that goes with it) within a symbolic order: "the man [Gennari is quoting from Gabbard now] whose collection is complete has no gaps and thus no anxieties about what is not there. The serial collector seeks plentitude, the warding off of castration." Aieee!

Then on the same theme, on page 65, again incorporating a quote from Gabbard, Gennari writes: "As long as the white male jazz fan stands by his claims of a purely artistic appreciation, he 'need not concern himself with the homoerotic and voyeuristic element of his fascination with black men as they enact their masculinity with saxophones, trumpets, guitars, and other phallic instruments.'" Then, down the page, Gennari writes that he is "not quite as ready as Gabbard "to explain jazz's art discourse as largely the product of the repression of interracial homoerotic desire," if only because Gabbard himself "disproves ... [that] stereotype... by living a life that happily accomodates both his copious vinyl collection and his wife...."