“Jazz has always been a music of fusion. ‘Nothing from New Orleans is ever pure’ — so goes an old throwaway phrase. But even by Crescent City standards, early jazz was an especially complex melange. The Southern mentality that obsessively measured infinitesimal gradations — delineating differences of quadroon from octoroon the way Aquinas demarked angels from cherubim and seraphim — quickly came to a cul-de-sac in tracing the lineage of this radical new music. Impure at its birth, jazz grew ever more so as it evolved. Its history is marked by a fondness for musical miscegenation, by its desire to couple with other styles and idioms, producing new, radically different progeny. In its earliest form, jazz showed an ability to assimilate the blues, the rag, the march and other idioms; as it evolved, it transformed a host of even more disparate sounds and styles. It showed no pretensions, mixing as easily with vernacular musics — the American popular song, the Cuban son, the Brazilian samba, the Argentinean tango — as with concert-hall fare. Jazz in its contemporary form bears traces of all these passages. It is the most glorious of mongrels.”
It is difficult to imagine a more succinct description of jazz’s evolution and central character. Cross-fertilization is its dominant characteristic, which is why the balkanization to which its performers, composers and listeners are too often prone — dividing as they do along lines of style, of tradition and of, alas, race — is so unrelated to the true reality of the music. Jazz is a mix, as Gioia conclusively demonstrates, not merely of musical styles but of other influences, some of which are not immediately detectable: the phonograph recording and the radio, the ceaseless combat between art and commerce, a seductive, pervasive “mythology . . . that romanticized the jazz life,” the pull between tradition and the “forward-looking” impulse of modernism. The point about jazz is not that everything within it seems so different but that everything connects.
The History of Jazz is not absolutely perfect. Gioia deals with the questions of race that are so central to every aspect of it but tends to dance around them; an extended discussion of the conflicting and mutually reinforcing strains of Jim Crow and its obverse, Crow Jim, is missing, and is a major omission. Every reader’s personal inclinations will at times run aground on Gioia’s judgment; I happen to think he overrates Stan Kenton and, in emphasizing the “chamber-music style” of the Modern Jazz Quartet, underemphasizes its persistent, if at times subtle, swing. Though he provides a useful, highly selective list of recommended recordings, it is a pity that his publisher did not include a compact disc of illustrative selections, as Yale University Press did a couple of years ago for Barry Kernfeld’s What to Listen for in Jazz.
Never mind. If you are looking for an introduction to jazz, this is it. If you know and love jazz well, this is your vade mecum. Me, I expect to be reading around in it for the rest of my life. (boldness, mine; mbw)
Ok, so that’s a 500-word pilfer of Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, from 1997, praising Ted Gioia’s “The History of Jazz.” In penance, I will trot over to Palo Alto Mitchell Park library, also known as Cubberley Multipurpose Room (where I once booked Broun Fellinis to jam, past their curfew; and somebody else once booked, at a Japanese fair, Shing02 and The Terracota Troops), and check out (literally and figuratively) Gioia’s book on the master works, as soon as I finish this short riff and chug the rest of my Peet’s. I started at said library but got there 45 minutes before it’s opening. I started this bit of digging — perhaps not unlike Frida the cocker spaniel pawing away at the sands of Half Moon Bay, in her youth — with the electronic version of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s New York Times magazine telling of the Geechie Wiley and Elvie Something tale — rare blues sides, by rarer PKA’s, on Paramount, but in Wisconsin (huh!?). I don’t recall if the article mentions Ted Gioia but the wiki does. He wrote a book on the Delta Blues and covered some of the same ground as yesterday’s Times, but got there well before. I did digress into Jack White in Nashville but not the Ugandan guy he produced recently that I only just learned of on KZSU, when I called to ask the dj to use “Tweed Funk” “Real Mother for Ya” as a chaser for Grand Funk “We’re an American Band” — I was going to suggest to a member of Tweed Funk they do a mash-up called “We’re a Wisconsin Funk Band!” — and will certainly forward back towards those lake areas the “news” about Elvie.
I’m also carrying around Stella Brooks’ Q4 2013 royalty statement from Smithsonian Folkways and debating the ethics of describing it: she, ten years past passing, raked in another $4.37 — about what I spent on my cappucino — for 2 sales of a compact disc she splits mit Greta Keller, some album downloads, some track downloads and some digital streaming. Depending on your frame of reference you either want to toast to Moe Asch and Folkways>Smithsonian (going under the name Cecille Chen at POB 37012 MRC 520, Washington, DC 20013) or Alabama shake your fist at them, like the fictional version of Dave Von Ronk, played by Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, asking for the winter coat of Mel TK (played by TK) but based apparently on Asch. (I was managing the music estate of Stella Brooks for an 18-month term a few years back, or at least her niece told me to believe I was if the actual Executor never did — if there is a distinction — so I am indirectly comparing Stella Brooks myth and legend with aforesaid Elvie and Goochie, before digressing or evolving into Yardley and Gioia).
The year that Jonathan Yardley won the Pulitzer his son Jim Yardley (and Bill) was my classmate and running-buddy at Gunn High; their mom (the critic’s ex-wife) was a Knight Fellow at Stanford for the year, 1980-1981. Henceforth the name Yardley has struck more than a few diddley-bo chords all these front porch and Piedmont blues seasons. As y’all can ascertain on your own part by punching that name into the Plastic Alto / wordpress search function — not quite an obsession but a little hyper-caffeinated.
Gioia plays the tiniest cameo role in my “The History of Palo Alto / Jazz”, which is either the ultimate utterance on the entire history of Western Civ and this subject or just a rough draft and query about a proposed event via PAHA that would, more rightly feature Mr. Gioia and a few select others (i.e. “WOGS” or “the WOGS”, although it could, now that I am tracking Jana Herzen, see below, be amended to “the WHOGS”, however you say that: Ar-whoooglie, like a Fields medal Kyoto Prize holler.
If you’ve continued on in good faith for another 600 words here, might as well go all in, taking the hint from the algorithm higher power at wordpress and read the three related “Plastic Alto” posts:
1. “Jazztime travels or jazz scribe contrafacts” which is also known as “The History of Jazz / Palo Alto” which is about a 20,000 word tome, be forewarned, wear sunscreen; it’s officially at 24,385 which does not include a deleted pre-amble about Vijay Iyer, and I recommend some of the comments, especially by New Ager Steven Halpern and the guy who wrote a book on Vince Guaraldi; if you are starting here, please know that I claim sometimes that it is recursive as a matter of style; pingback but it also “sticks” to the mast head (dude tossing bowling ball), if you enter “Plastic Alto” via the front door rather than from the search-injuns.
2. Don Cherry at Dartmouth which is actually a draft of something that was eventually ripped to shreds and printed in abstract in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine; 1,899 words, I think I could go to 5K quite easily. The later draft, on some long-abandoned word processing machine or a hard paper copy filed who knows where, but probably not, with my luck, the three inch think file, used a “pied piper” motif for the lead, beyond “this specific silence” which is a little passive and passé.
3. Something about Sam Rivers at Dartmouth, based on noticing a poster in the lobby of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth. About 1,609 words, written five days after his death, but like this relies too much on lifting from other works, and jumps around too much. I’m amiss in my miscegenation of topics.
edita: an hour overtime, since this is a sort of crate-digging exercise from the gecko, why not outro with The Mindbenders version of (something associated with Stella Brooks), “She’s a Little Piece of Leather”? (if interobang is a question and a exclamation, what is a question and a colon? And 4) I was originally 90 minutes ago, clutching now wrinkled version of yesterday’s fish paper to be, Aidin Vizari on closing of Cafe DuNord and Red Devil Lounge, and what it all means):
edita edita:
Jim Yardley (son of Jon) is now Rome Bureau chief of NYT and his bio somehow fails to mention all our mutually formative one-on-one contests at Escondido Village basketball courts in the spring of 1981. Meanwhile Jonathan Yardley, who I’ve never met, is about 75, writes sporadically for the Post, and recommends from the crop of 2013 Daniel Brook (sic, no relation to Stella) “A History of Future Cities” which rings a faint bell with me, if not a Faith Bell, and, at least to this hyper-Peet’sied bundle of synapses fits the format of my jazzscribe/contrafact thingy.
edit to add, finding 90 minutes at the end of the day: to luxuriate in the act of revising or editing or proofing, even, the 1600 above, and/or skimming or noting or plugging my bounty, the three bound volumes / titles with which I did abscond from the public libraries (plural; two stops) today: 1) Brook, “…Future Cities” (2013); 2) Gioia, “Jazz Standards” (2012); and, because this title is the only thing in our system by him, Yardley, “Second Reading” 2011 — and it lists 6 other possible titles; with Gioia, we have two other titles but they are “in storage” as we feed the Gods of Pork — And Capital Investment — our libraries are under construction, two out of five, that is, which is great in baseball but pretty crappy for a library system).
And speaking of fathers (Jim’s), my own called to say that David Wiegand had a story in the Chronicle about a new tv series and he wanted to know if my friends Steve and Eric Cohen (sons of Paul, the math whiz) were involved. No, Dad, that’s Joel and Ethan and “no H”. But picking up the tear sheet from him, and dropping off some matzo ball soup, I was psyched to see Edward Guthman on prince of posters David Lance Goines.
And so far about half way thru this exercise I have made about 22 small fixes, not that the thing is now strung with pearls, as my Editor Ed Burns used to say.
Revision strawberry letter small 23: this is too many threads even for this tangled web but: Mel TK above is Mel Novikoff, played by Jerry Grayson, who passed away post-filming but pre-release, his dates being 1935-March, 2013; the reviewer for the East Bay Express suggesting that the naming of the Moses Mo Asch character is a tip of hat to legendary Bay Area film exhibitor Mel Novikoff, in whose name SF Film Society gives an award, this year, next month, going to the near-Yardleyan (and Dartmouthian) David Thomson, even though, as Dave Von Ronk’s widow and many others suggest, the depiction of Asch or the asch-archetype is not very flattering.
And running out of steam I will refrain from dovetailing the Yardley article about Cannery Row to the Steinbeck mention above (i.e. that I wrote and posted after this). For the Gioia book, I opened to a page at random, p. 429-430 and noted a song I don’t actually recognize by name, but has versions from Hamiet Bluiett (and I will fact-check that spelling, even if Gioia presumably did) and Monk, in 1996 and 1952, “these foolish things”.
Ok, I lied. I’m still here. Let’s end with a link to Greil Marcus interviewing David Thomson for the LA Reader of Books, because Marcus says, first off that he has read Thomson(who appears May 4, at screening of “The Lady Even” with Barabara Stanwyck)’s new book “The Big Screen” but admits to being a “slow reader” – I was toying with asking Yardley to consent to an email interview and asking him just how fast does he read?
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 