Mark Miller's A Certain Respect for Tradition

[Nate Dorward]

Just received Miller's new collection of interviews, reviews & articles from Mercury Press, & have been reading it off & on all day. It's a great book, & I'd recommend it to anyone who likes well-turned prose & shrewd judgments about jazz, from a writer whose interests range widely (it covers everything from the ODJB to Derek Bailey), whose expertise in the Canadian jazz scene was formidable but never uncritical or boosterish (non-Canadian readers will learn about figures like Freddie Stone & Paul Plimley from the book), & whose only bete noire was the repackaging of jazz as a slick commodity or nostalgia trip. The book, perhaps unfortunately, leaves out most of his negative reviews--the only one I've found so far is a review of a Wynton Marsalis concert which analyses it as the musical equivalent of a corporate boardroom meeting--but given that it's a very selective gathering of material (184pp for 26 years' work) it was certainly the right decision to keep to the highpoints rather than the lows.

Some nonCanadian readers will have seen a few pieces from Coda, but the majority of the pieces are from the Globe and Mail so I imagine they'll be news to nonCanadian readers. There's also a lengthy 1980s piece on/interview with Cecil Taylor which only appeared in Banff Letters.

The book is published simultaneously with David Lee's The Battle of the Five Spot, an account of Ornette's debut (a glance at it suggest it's heavy on the Bourdieu)--haven't yet dived into that one.