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Gary Giddins
__________________________________
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, who was prominently featured in
Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, and who is the country's preeminent
jazz critic, joins us in a conversation recorded on June 20, 2003 -- and then slightly revised in October -- about the profession
of jazz criticism.
The conversation is an autobiographical look at the writer's ascension in
his field, and includes candid observations of other prominent critics. It
concludes with a unique "Blindfold Test" that asks Giddins (and the reader, if he or she wishes) to name the jazz
writer responsible for the essay excerpt he is spontaneously shown.
*
Conversation Topics
Initiating an interest in
criticism
The importance of
Esquire magazine
Other influential publications
His discovery of wanting
to be a writer
Criticism, not fiction
Writing for Downbeat
Taking a stab at film criticism
His first record reviews
The first Village Voice
piece
Jazz criticism influences
Deciding on column topics
The challenge of
remaining excited about music
Jazz today
Jazz's past and how
it affects jazz today
Stuck on defining jazz
On Stanley Crouch
and the foundation of jazz
Who he writes for
The state of the art of
jazz criticism
On "do it yourself" amateur
reviews
The Blindfold Test
*
painting by
Shara
Banisadr
"I don't like the idea of trying to put a button on jazz, strictly defining
the parameters, saying, 'If you don't do this you are not playing jazz.'
I don't think it is true of any art form. I remember a writer in the Times
saying once that not being able to define jazz was like not being able
to define baroque. The guy was an idiot, because, of course, you can't define
baroque. Baroque is a very large category in which all kinds of aesthetic
worlds co-mingle. That is also true of jazz, and I certainly don't think
somebody should be penalized for attempting to stretch the music in a different
direction. When people try to stop the clock, they stop artistic pursuit,
they limit the emotional response that we have to art. If stopping the clock
is what gives them pleasure, fine, but I don't think that's good for the
art, and it certainly has no appeal to me."
- Gary Giddins
- Listen to pianist Art Tatum play
St. Louis Blues
__________________________________
JJM
What initiated your interest in criticism?
GG One of the first writers who got me excited
was Dwight MacDonald, who wrote a movie column for Esquire in the
sixties. In those days Esquire had a large format with a flat spine,
and my father would keep them behind a hatbox in the closet -- which at age
eleven or twelve made me wonder what he was hiding. On a night when my parents
were out, I started looking through them and found a letter to the editor
from a woman complaining about MacDonald's review of Ben Hur. She
said she couldn't understand why MacDonald complained about the various accents
used by actors in the film, since she hadn't noticed any actors; the film
had transported her to ancient Rome. I thought that was hilarious, so I looked
through the issues to find MacDonald's Ben Hur review. Kids tend to
be a shy in their opinions, especially about something touted as great or
a classic. Ben Hur was a movie I found troubling for different reasons
than MacDonald, but his prose, his detachment from the general commentary,
his wit, his dissection of what was on the screen felt liberating to me.
I had never read real criticism and it changed my way of thinking -- a different
way of looking at art and the world. Until then I had been accustomed to
accepting the idea of a movie or book being great because it was prized and
praised, but MacDonald encouraged me to step back and trust my own reactions,
my own dissent. I read each issue of Esquire looking for MacDonald
-- and also found the Vargas drawings of half-naked women.
|
JJM
So the experience of reading MacDonald made you want to explore criticism
further?
GG More than that: It introduced the field,
and inspired me to read the other Esquire reviewers. They had book
reviews by Dorothy Parker and later Malcolm Muggeridge, who was similarly
independent and acerbic. The classical music critic was Martin Mayer, and
I often saved up to buy records he reviewed, including Virgil Thomson's Four
Saints in Three Acts, much of which I can still sing though I haven't
listened to it in years. Then I discovered Thomson to be a remarkable critic.
Norman Mailer wrote a column called "Big Bite" that blathered about the bitch
goddess and the Kennedy's, and was interesting up to a point. Pretty soon
I started reading seriously -- Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and
Edmund Wilson all around the same time. I all but bathed in Wilson's
Classics and Commercials and The Shores of Light. And of course,
Aldous Huxley, who greatly influenced my thinking and writing. Later Max
Beerbohm and James Huneker, among many others. |
 |
Esquire
1965
*
Downbeat
*
Evergreen Review
1957 |
JJM
What other publications did you read?
GG After discovering jazz at age fifteen,
I was walking with my father down the street in Manhattan and saw a picture
of Sonny Rollins on the cover of Downbeat, and asked him to buy it
for me, at the then considerable price of thirty-five cents. Read it cover
to cover. The record reviews were signed with the initials of the critics
and I got to know them so well that I'd blindfold-test myself, covering the
initials and guessing the author from the first graph or so. I always knew
when the initials would be "D.M." for Dan Morgenstern. I felt an emotional
connection with him, because his writing stood apart from everyone else's;
it had so much warmth and authority and generosity. I'd buy almost any record
Morgenstern recommended.
During this time I also read the Evergreen Review because I loved
Samuel Beckett and many of the new writers they published. That's where I
first read Martin Williams, who had perfected a particular essayistic form
of jazz crit, proving there could be a Wilsonian approach to jazz criticism
-- that it was a wide open field, a young field with much serious work to
be done. I wrote about Martin's work in Faces In the Crowd and an
obituary appreciation of him will be included in my next book, Weather
Bird.
I occasionally read the New Yorker and blindfold-tested myself with
those writers, too, because at that time the magazine didn't have a table
of contents. So after a couple of paragraphs you'd know it was John O'Hara
or Cheever or Perelman or, on one occasion, Salinger, when he published "Hapworth
16, 1924." I think the first time I read Whitney Balliett was when they ran
his long piece on Buddy Rich. I didn't see Whitney's stuff often at the time,
and he didn't influence me until later, maybe because his metaphorical approach
initially put me off. It assumes a certain musical sophistication. Metaphors
depend on one's knowing both sides of the equation. If I write of "the wine-dark
sea," for that to have any meaning, the reader has to know what the sea looks
like and what wine is. Comparing Pee Wee Russell to a mansard roof had a
limited appeal for me, though later I became a huge admirer of Balliett's
writing. I loved Ira Gitler's stuff-- pithy, argumentative, full of puns
and good feeling, and absolutely on the mark when it came to anything related
to bop. I've learned a lot from him. But mostly it was Martin's work that
made me want to run out and listen to Jelly Roll with his essay in hand to
see if I could hear things he wrote about. Same with Morgenstern's liner
notes, when he singled out the best eight bars I'd focus on them and try
to understand what made them special. Criticism brought me deeper into jazz
and jazz brought me deeper into criticism.
JJM
When did you discover you wanted to be a writer?
GG I always wanted to be a writer. My first
true hero was Nathanial Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables is
one of the books I'd need on my desert island. It is the definitive treatment
of the sins of the father and the weight of time. I reread it every few years,
always with a new and different sense of astonishment, but also with nostalgia
because it is a novel I read in fifth grade, inspired by the Classics Illustrated
comic. It changed my feelings about writing and about books. I wanted to
be the Hawthorne of my time, and was a long time in giving up that ambition.
Before that, I read a lot young people's biographies and soon identified
more with the people telling the stories than their subjects. So I knew I
was a writer. The question was, what kind? I figured I'd write literary reviews
on the side while writing my own "House of the Seven Gables" or something.
It never occurred to me that I had no talent for fiction, though reading
V was a helluva wakeup call. |
During my senior year in college, I wrote a short story for a fiction seminar.
I greatly admired the professor, a fearful and wonderful man named M. M.
Lieberman -- that was his by-line. He wrote a collection of short stories
that many years later I reviewed in the Village Voice. Mr. Lieberman
was very tough and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but he was my
kind of professor and I hung on his every word. My senior year was the year
of Kent State, and Grinnell College, where I went to school, shut down its
facilities in solidarity. No graduation -- diplomas were mailed in the fall.
Everyone had to leave except
those of us who lived off campus, which meant seniors and faculty. I still
had to do oral comprehensives as an English major. I met with Mr. Lieberman
at the student union over a cup of coffee. My three subjects were Eliot,
Hemingway and Wilson ---Eliot as poet and critic, Wilson as critic, and Hemingway
as fiction writer. We talked for a few minutes, and Lieberman said I seemed
to know the stuff pretty well, and changed the subject to writing in general.
I had written a short story for him that he hated. I rewrote it but never
heard from him about it. So I asked why, and he said, "Mr. Giddins, there
really wasn't anything to say. The story is worthless. If I were you, I would
never write fiction again. Although, of course, if you are really serious
about writing you won't listen to a goddamn thing I say. But, I want to say
something to you. You have a gift for criticism. You should pursue it."
| JJM
Nothing like a positive comment from the professor to get the blood
rushing...
GG Right. I didn't give a damn about what
he said about my fiction. It was just one of those moments -- the kind of
feedback I had never received before. When I told friends about Lieberman's
comment on my story, they looked at me as if I must have been heart-broken,
but I said, "No, the guy told me I'm a critic." And I believed him.
When I got out of school, that's the direction I took, and was turned down
by virtually every publication in the country, including the Voice.
I got surprisingly unkind responses from Rolling Stone and
Creem. I was a mess, but determined and strangely confident because
I couldn't do anything else. I was going to write and that was all there
was to it. Eventually Dan Morgenstern at Downbeat gave me an assignment
to review McCoy Tyner at a place called Slugs. Tyner used a deafening drummer,
Alphonse Mouzon, and I couldn't hear a thing -- it was a dreadful set. I
didn't know what to do, because this was to be my first review. I loved
McCoy Tyner, and didn't feel comfortable criticizing him on the basis of
one set. So I called Dan and told him I didn't know how to deal with this.
I asked him if I should go back and hear another set and he said he couldn't
get me comped again. I decided to wait for another assignment. |
Dan Morgenstern
*
"Dan's style of writing in Downbeat and on album liner notes was
so convincing and so full of feeling that you wanted to share the experience
he was having about that music."
-Gary Giddins |
JJM And he gave you another shot?
GG Yes. Within a couple of weeks I wrote
about Mingus's return to the Vanguard -- I think that was my first published
jazz article other than liner notes -- and a Jim Hall/Ron Carter set at Guitar.
They both ran, and he gave me more stuff including records to review. Dan
called me once and said he got a letter from Leonard Feather, asking who
I was. That kind of interest from Leonard was unusual and for me it was amazing
to realize I was being read by the guy who wrote the New Encyclopedia
of Jazz, which I had virtually memorized.
 |
JJM
Your career also includes film criticism.
GG I suggested to Dan that I interview Nell
King about her role as editor of Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog.
The day after the interview, she called me up to say that a friend of hers
had become editor of the Hollywood Reporter and asked her if she wanted
to review films. She said she didn't want the job, but thought that it might
interest me. I called the editor, Paul Sargeant Clark, who told me to send
him three movie reviews; I went to see three movies that day and the next,
sent him the reviews, and he hired me. I spent most of that year reviewing
films, at $5.00 a review: fifty reviews for $250. I was working as a copy
boy at a newspaper, so I wrote them during my lunch hour -- a very useful
apprenticeship.
I was doing occasional pieces for Downbeat at the same time, and after
a year and a half of that, I felt I needed to choose between film and music.
I thought if I did both, I would always be a dilettante, because you need
to bury yourself in a subject, and I didn't feel I could do justice to both.
The decision didn't require any real thought. For one thing, the Hollywood
Reporter fired me and a couple of other people over my review of Lady
Sings the Blues -- Paramount had threatened to withdraw advertising.
But I never felt my work as a film critic was in any way necessary. I was
just another guy with an opinion. Film criticism would get along perfectly
well without me. |
JJM There are so many film critics, they are
kind of like weathermen. There are three in every city.
GG There is that. But there were many film
reviewers I respected, and I didn't think my criticism added anything. In
jazz, however, though I was a novice and there were obviously critics I admired,
I was arrogant enough to think I had something to say that no one else was
saying. Without something akin to that kind of arrogance, you can't move
forward. It's arrogant to believe that anyone should read your prose, or
look at your paintings, or listen to your music, or watch you act. You need
a sense of certainty and in jazz I had that.
I loved jazz more than anything -- well jazz and literature, which was doing
all right without me -- and I was delusional about what I could do for it.
I was going to introduce jazz to my generation, rid it of stigma and mystery.
I felt I could be a liaison between the rock and jazz worlds, even though
I knew nothing about contemporary rock. I was out of my fucking mind. In
any case, I put everything into jazz.
JJM
Do you remember the circumstances around your first jazz record reviews?
GG While I was at the Post, I met
an executive vice president of the New York Times. He asked if I would
do a review on spec for the Times. I had gotten to know the record
producer Don Schlitten, who gave me advance pressings of two records that
would be issued months later -- Art Tatum and Hot Lips Page after-hours sessions
recorded by Jerry Newman in 1941. I suggested them, pointing out that no
one else had them yet, and he said go ahead.
I sent him the review, and after some weeks went by, he told me that John
Wilson wanted to review the albums and, as their jazz critic, he had precedence.
I didn't care about that; what I wanted to know was if the review was actually
good enough that the Times would have run it. He was extremely supportive.
Since I hadn't kept a copy, I asked him to send it back, which he did.
| JJM
What did you do with it?
GG They came back to me at the Post,
and I took them from the envelope and put them into another envelope addressed
to Diane Fisher, the music editor at the Village Voice. I included
a cover note saying the reviews were written for the Times and were
in the Times style, where everyone is referred to as "Mr.," but that
it was an example of my writing and may I write for you?
A week later I was walking through the city desk, and Sylvianne Gold, a
Post copy girl who subsequently won a George Jean Nathan award in
theater criticism, not at the Post of course, said to me,
"Congratulations, I just read your piece in the Voice." I ran downstairs
and got a copy, and there it was, not a word changed. To this day, it is
probably the only Voice review that tagged everyone "Mr." I asked
Diane why she hadn't called me before she published it, and she told me she
liked it and just decided to put it in. I think I got $45. I asked her if
I could write for her, and she said to come in and talk.
This was 1973, incense is burning in her office, and I think we sat on throw
pillows. I told her I wanted to write a column, to which she derisively replied,
"You don't just get a column. You have to pay Voice dues." But she
invited me to contribute a Riff each week, and for the next year, I went
out three or four times a week, wrote my ass off, dropping reviews in the
Voice mail-slot every Sunday evening. There'd always be a dozen or
so envelopes lying on the ground, visible through the glass door. I didn't
see Diane again for a year and had very little communication. There was no
editing. If she didn't like something, it didn't run.
After eighteen months of that, the Voice changed ownership, and Diane
knew that her time might be up, but she told me I had now paid Voice
dues, and if she kept her job I'd get my column. A few days later I got a
call from Robert Christgau. The only thing I knew about him was a column
in Esquire, in which he expressed a loathing of Bill Evans and recent
Miles. I figured the jig was up but he asked me to do the column and we hit
it off right away, though at first I was shell-shocked about how much editing
we did. Going from no editing to the best line-editor I've ever known was
nothing if not confusing. I had not been edited at all in the Hollywood
Reporter and only superficially in Downbeat, so I had the illusion
I could write. Bob disabused me of that and taught me more than I can ever
repay. The column ran every three weeks, and I'd do riffs for the other weeks.
After a couple of years, I got to hating riffs. I was never comfortable with
the length. I felt my strength lay in 1800 word essays where I could combine
a general contemplation with obsessive detail. Eventually, I quit Riffs and
settled on the bi-weekly column. April marked my thirtieth year at the
Voice.
JJM
Who are your other jazz criticism influences?
GG In addition to Dan and Martin, I have
to add Albert Murray, both as a mentor and for his essays. I was lucky enough
to count Al as a friend when I was young, and I can't overstate his impact
on my thinking and writing. He introduced me to Constance Rourke, Susanne
Langer, John Kouwenhoven, and Thomas Mann's incomparable Doctor Faustus.
Albert was my graduate school. So those are the three main figures from the
jazz world, in addition to Macdonald, Huxley, Wilson, Shaw, Huneker, and
many others, including critics I abominated -- like Pauline Kael -- who in
a way were just as influential for showing me what not to do, like spending
half the review attacking colleagues and the other half establishing yourself
as more important than the subject under review. |
Robert Christgau
*
Albert Murray |
Gary Giddins
*
Weather
Bird is Giddins' Village Voice column |
JJM
How do you decide on what your next column is going to be?
GG Sometimes it's obvious. A musician is
in town whose very presence is a story. You can't not review a major show
or album release. In the beginning it's so easy, because you have everyone
to write about. After several years, by which time you've written many times
about certain artists, the pickings grow leaner. Some artists are always
inspiring -- I could never grow tired of thinking and writing about Armstrong
or Miles or Ellington or Rollins or Monk. But if I write an 1800-word essay
on, say, Sam Rivers, it may be a good long while before I feel inspired to
do another. On the other hand, I recently wrote a short piece about a terrific
new album by the great bandleader-arranger Gerald Wilson. Then I went to
see him at Birdland, and wished I could write the review all over again, because
-- good as the album is -- the live performance was exhilarating and I had
a much deeper understanding of what he was doing. Yet you can't go back to
the same well right away -- I'm not sure why.
So you're always looking for new subjects. I sample every disc that comes
to my office -- every disc, no matter what it is -- and always blindfold-tested.
One of the things my assistant Elora does is keep five new CD's in the changer,
and if something gets my ear, we put it into a "potential" pile. The stuff
I don't like at all we get rid of right away. There is a third pile -- the
"second chance" pile, where I need another listen before I know if I want
to consider writing about it or not. That covers the CD's, and then there's
the club scene. Is there a concert? Is someone playing whom I haven't heard
before? Is an established player doing something new? One thing you have
to keep in mind is that I wrote essays, not short reviews, so the kind of
record or concert I looked for were those that made me want to stretch out
for a few choruses. I'm not comfortable with the new Voice policy
of bite-size reviews.
In 1977, when I was writing a piece about Dizzy Gillespie's sixtieth birthday,
he told me that you would think trumpet playing gets easier as you go along,
but it gets harder. I asked him if he was referring to his embouchure, but
he said it had nothing to do with technique; it becomes harder because after
you've played certain ideas and have exhausted them, you have to find new
things. That's the way it is with writing. You exhaust phrases, you exhaust
ideas, you don't want to keep repeating yourself, so it becomes harder in
that sense, but easier in the purely technical sense. |
| JJM Is it hard to not become cynical about your
work?
GG It is easy to become cynical about your
own work. Does it have any value? Does anyone respond to it? But I've never
become cynical about the magic of music itself. That keeps me going. You
have to distinguish between musicians and the people who package the musicians.
I've never been cynical about jazz and the artists who play it. I've never
been anything but cynical about the record industry, which with few exceptions
is an appalling enterprise. I root for the downloaders -- they have a greater
love of music than its corporate gatekeepers.
In the '70s, I got to know Helen Humes, who sang at the Cookery. One night
she saw me walk in and waved me over to her table. I sat down, she opened
her purse, bubbling with enthusiasm, and told me she had something incredible
to show me -- it was a check for about $24 in royalties, sent by Don Schlitten,
who had put out "Midnight in Minton's" with Don Byas, on which Helen had
a couple of vocals. She told me she had been recording since she was thirteen
years old, sang with Count Basie, had big rhythm and blues hits in the forties,
and yet this was the first royalty check she had ever received. She said
she wasn't going to cash it, she was going to put it up on her wall. That
says a lot about the record business. |
photo by Helen Mandel
Helen Humes
Somebody Loves Me |
JJM Martin
Williams wrote, "We have a favorite pastime in jazz -- we musicians, reviewers,
historians, journalists, fans. When we get together in almost any combination,
the conversation will sooner or later turn to laments that jazz is not
understood, does not have the respect, the prestige, the support that the
music has rightfully earned and that our symphonies and opera companies have."
How important is it to a critic that jazz be respected or "understood?"
GG I remember the period when a statement
like that would have been true. It is certainly not true now. Maybe we have
become, not cynical, but too accepting of the situation. We know jazz is
going to be passed over by the Pulitzer and trivialized by the Grammy, and
so forth. In other ways, jazz is too respected. Now conversations are usually
about whether anyone is excited about a new recording or recent performance,
and who's new on the scene. The question about prestige is an old one, and
I think it has largely disappeared.
JJM Many of us are attracted to jazz not only
because the music reaches us, but also because it resides outside the mainstream
culture. Isn't that part of the appeal and would we be as excited about the
music if it were a more integral part of the popular culture?
GG I don't know. I don't agree with that.
There are certain recordings I listen to that still amaze me because no one
knows about them. When I listen to a Count Basie record, and my heart is
fluttering along with Lester Young, I catch myself thinking that maybe two
percent of the nation's population knows this music. Yet it was popular in
its day, and I have no doubt that if it had more exposure, it would find
a level of popularity in our day as well.
I will tell you something that jazz critics used to talk about all the time.
"How did you get into it?" In no other field do people say that. "How did
you get into books?" or "How did you get into film?" How could you not get
into them? But in order to appreciate jazz, most of us had to step outside
the boundaries of our regular lives, because it is not readily available.
It is not a question of whether it becomes a popular music. The question
is whether it is allowed to reach its potential. One thing we learned from
the Ken Burns series is that people all over the country watched it. They
got involved with some of the stories and artists. Jazz record sales doubled
in February of that year and declined when the show finished. I was on a
book tour immediately after the Burns program aired, and every place I went,
people would want to tell me about their experiences with jazz. A guy in
Chicago told me, with astonishment, that his fourteen-year-old daughter came
home from Tower Records with two CD's -- Britney Spears and Louis Armstrong.
So, even kids were responding. You just have to assume that if the music
were available on radio and television, and not just as homework in survey
classes, that a lot more people would awaken to its pleasures.
People forget that in the early and mid sixties there were many jazz hits.
There was "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," "Desifinado," "The Sidewinder," "Hello Dolly,"
"Take Five," "Hang on Sloopy," "The In Crowd," and others. There was a real
window for jazz producers to take advantage. Few of them did.
*
photo by
Lee
Tanner
Miles Davis
Spanish Key
|
JJM In the introduction to Visions of Jazz, you
wrote, "A jazz classicism that can keep alive the music of Ellington and
Basie and Lunceford and Gil Evans, yet fails to coexist with the most vital
of jazz traditions -- its inventiveness, irreverence, and canny involvement
with other musics and life as we live it -- will produce a dozen lovely plaster
busts for home or school and a gorgeously ornate headstone." Does the past
become so mythologized that the present holds little luster with critics
and fans?
GG The jazz audience is generational. People
like the music that aroused their interest when they were young. They don't
necessarily follow it into the next period. At the JVC Festival recently,
there was a Bix Beiderbecke concert, and some guy told me that this was the
best jazz band he had heard in forty years. I couldn't even respond to that.
Clearly he only wanted to hear this kind of music. There are a lot of people
like that. I have met people over the years for whom jazz ended with Bird
or Stan Getz or Ellington. Critics are often generalists who try to follow
the entire development of the music. Most listeners do not. In downtown New
York, the avant-garde fans pay lip service to the earlier players -- they
know and love some of them -- but that is not where their focus is. People
who listen to traditional jazz basically ignore what the avant-garde does.
That's the way it's always been and always will be. Most people who buy
subscriptions to Mostly Mozart do not support The Kitchen.
There is a mainstream sound now that can be characterized as a "post-Miles
Davis sound," and when concerts feature musicians who came up in the generation
of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and the Breckers, an audience is there
for them. For many people jazz begins with Miles. I recently received the
souvenir book for the Playboy Jazz Festival, and would you believe there
was not one Louis Armstrong performance among their list of the twenty-five
essential jazz recordings? That's insane. |
JJM
Do people concern themselves too much with trying to define
what is and isn't jazz?
GG I don't like the idea of trying to put
a button on jazz, strictly defining the parameters, saying, "If you don't
do this you are not playing jazz." I don't think it is true of any art form.
I remember a writer in the Times saying once that not being able to
define jazz was like not being able to define baroque. The guy was an idiot,
because, of course, you can't define baroque. Baroque is a very large category
in which all kinds of aesthetic worlds co-mingle. That is also true of jazz,
and I certainly don't think somebody should be penalized for attempting to
stretch the music in a different direction. When people try to stop the clock,
they stop artistic pursuit, they limit the emotional response that we have
to art. If stopping the clock is what gives them pleasure, fine, but I don't
think that's good for the art, and it certainly has no appeal to me.
JJM In addressing that, you wrote, "Spoilsports
emerge who want to establish more exclusive laws of jazz immigration. Unlike
Ellington, who reveled in diversity and abhorred restrictions, the guardians
of musical morality are appalled by such latitude, and mean to cleanse jazz
of impurities transmitted through contact with the European classics, American
pop, new music, and other mongrel breeds."
GG Well, Ellington was attacked for "Reminiscing
in Tempo" for the same reasons that musicians are being attacked now, whether
it is Dave Douglas for playing Balkan rhythms or Don Byron for mixing classical
and jazz. In a sense, that is the obligation of the artist, to play what
he knows. That's an old literary cliché. What do you write about?
You write about what you know. You play what you know. You paint what you
know. You give free reign to your imagination. No artist abides by a rulebook.
Why would critics want to imagine that a rulebook could or should exist?
It never has, it never will.
| JJM What do you make of Stanley Crouch's argument
that there is an attempt by certain critics to downplay jazz music's African
American heritage and stretch the jazz idiom to include more white, European
in-fluenced musical explorations?
GG There may be, I don't know. If he is upset
because there are a few writers writing like that, then I agree with him
-- there are fools in every idiom. I don't know a serious jazz critic who
would want to argue that jazz is not at its base an African American form.
At the same time, we also know that there have been great white players from
the very beginning, and that there have been great players in Europe from
almost the very beginning. If it was just a black music it would be a folk
music and it would have had no more international impact than bluegrass.
But jazz is an international art. It is bigger than any one artist or any
one people or any one nation. Nevertheless, we all know where it comes from.
We know that most of its great artists have been black and continue to be
black, but I think you want to be very careful about how far you go with
that. I don't think you want to sit in the theater and say, "Well, I don't
know, can Bill Charlap really play?" I know Stanley would never say something
like that.
It seems to me that the great white players are the ones who don't imitate
their black idols. For example, Stan Getz was not an interesting player when
he was just playing Dexter Gordon and Lester Young licks. It is when he
discovered who he was and started playing himself that he became a truly
great jazz musician. To achieve anything of value you have to show who you
are. Louis Armstrong said that jazz is what you are. The saxophonist Brew
Moore once said that if you don't play like Lester Young, you are playing
wrong. That is why most of the people reading this conversation never heard
of Moore -- a very good tenor player if you want to hear somebody playing
Lester Young riffs. But he never went much further than that. The great players
play who they are, where they come from, what they know. |
Stanley Crouch
*
"When [Crouch] is cooking, he's amazing. He's done some of the
best writing on Ellington and Armstrong ever. His attack on Cecil Taylor
in the Voice, controversial though it
was...forced me to think more deeply about my own feelings. "
-Gary Giddins |
The foundation of the music, in terms of swing, timbre, blue notes, harmonies,
melodies, riffs, call-and-response -- well, we know where that comes from.
It comes from the church, created in America by Negroes. As Art Blakey never
tired of saying, it did not come from Africa. There are elements that come
from Africa but the genius of Louis Armstrong is American -- it may be America's
saving grace. It certainly did not come from Europe, even though he uses
a European system of harmony. At this point, after one hundred years, if
people in Europe decide that instead of wanting to learn the music of Bach,
Beethoven and Mozart, their real gods are Ellington, Armstrong and Parker,
who will complain about that? Let them work in that idiom. If they produce
something good, cool. If not, then, good try. What else is there to say?
Cecil Taylor
Enter, Evening |
JJM The critic Martha Bayles said in
a recent Jerry Jazz Musician conversation on jazz criticism that art evolves,
and its evolution doesn't mean that the next generation's art is going to
be better than that of the previous generation, it just means it is going
to be different.
GG Yes, and that is what critics do. Critics
chronicle and evaluate the music as it comes to them. That is pretty much
the limit of what we do. I don't think that at our best we are proselytizers
waging arguments about who is legitimate and who isn't. Everybody has to
be taken on their own speed. I have often said, and I think I said this to
you in our conversation about Cecil Taylor, that if Taylor had been white
and had come out of a different background, he might have been playing to
a different audience. |
JJM Yes, and he would have been recording
for Deutsche Gramophone.
GG Exactly. For whatever reason, Taylor came
into my life; I was pursuing jazz and I stumbled across him and I am grateful
I did. Now, if you want to argue that on some level it is not jazz, I would
be happy to debate you on that subject. But I don't really give a shit. As
I've said before, you can call it whatever you want. All I know is that his
music fills me with joy, and so does Bud Powell's and Fats Waller's. I am
glad that they exist.
The name "jazz" simply cannot contain all the music that exists under the
umbrella -- and that is a tribute to jazz, a tribute to the African American
achievement, a tribute to a music that has survived for over one hundred
years without much support from the establishment, without a majority audience.
Yet it continues to attract young musicians of great talent. I am sure Jason
Moran could find a lot of ways to make bigger bucks, going on tour as many
of his predecessors did, supporting pop and soul groups. Instead, he comes
to New York to contribute something to this great tradition. In every generation
we get those kinds of artists. The other night, with Gerald Wilson, I heard
a gifted young trumpet player named Sean Jones. I guarantee you will be hearing
a lot from him. Thank God for these guys.
JJM
Francis Davis writes in "Advertisements for Myself," the
introduction to his collection of essays called Like Young, "I admit
to addressing my fellow critics as well as potential record buyers." Do you
ever find yourself addressing your fellow critics in addition to your audience?
GG I don't. I never do. Unless I am taking
on another critic, which I try not to do unless I read something that really
really pisses me off. When I go into the alternative universe of writing,
the person I mostly write for is me. I am writing in part to the kind of
fan I was when I was sixteen or seventeen, reading jazz criticism. I'm writing
the kind of work that I like to read, writing to explain to myself what I'm
hearing and thinking.
I was a substitute movie critic for Jim Hoberman in 1990, and during that
time I discovered that even though I was writing the same amount of words
every week, I was doing it in half the time. One reason is that so much of
film writing is concrete -- that is, it deals with plot and material that
you have to put in about the acting, photography, and so forth. There is
far less of that when you write about music. So much of it is abstract. You
are looking for concrete terms to describe the ineffable, especially when,
like me, you can't rely on the specifics of musicology. There are times when
I would love to be able to explain why a particular chord moves me, or write
about the way a sixth chord works in a certain context, or understand a
particular cycle of harmonies. I don't know any of that stuff so I am forced
to rely on more traditional literary means. Writing to other critics doesn't
interest me at all. What am I going to tell a Francis Davis or a Dan Morgenstern
or Stanley Crouch? I'd be scared to death if every time I started typing
I imagined them looking over my shoulder.
| JJM Not being a musician, I have often
had trouble maintaining an interest in a musical biography where the music
is discussed in detail.
GG I love that stuff, actually. I enjoy putting
on records and then reading the musical transcriptions. That's great fun.
As a critic, I have been very grateful to Gunther Schuller for his Early
Jazz transcriptions. I function in a different world, as most critics do.
If you are writing in a popular journal for a mainstream audience, you can't
do musicology -- even if you have the ability. Something else I have discovered
over the years is that people who have that ability very often don't have
ears. I was so intimidated once, meeting a music professor after I did a
lecture at his university, and then he told me that the greatest trombonist
who ever lived was Bart Varsalona. This guy could listen to a J.J. Johnson
or Jack Teagarden solo and write it right out, but not necessarily feel it.
It's a separate talent. |
Gunther Schuller |
JJM
Before we get to the "Blindfold Test," I know you want to say something
about the state of the art of jazz criticism.
GG Yes. I often read people complaining about
how bad the state of jazz criticism is. There was an article in
The Nation
about how low the level is. Yet no school of criticism from my generation
-- the baby boomer generation -- has shown more talent than the jazz guys.
Not in film, literature, dance, or classical music criticism can you find
as many solid and devoted critics as Stanley Crouch, Bob Blumenthal, J.R.
Taylor when he was writing, Don Heckman, Francis Davis, Scott DeVeaux, Peter
Keepnews, Larry Kart, Will Friedwald, John Litweiler, Gene Santoro, John
Corbett, Gene Seymour, Kelvyn Williams, Steve Futterman, Ben Ratliff, Ted
Gioia, Bill Milkowski, Howard Mandel, Eugene Holley, Bill Kirchner, Ashley Kahn, Fred Kaplan, Ted Pankin, Lewis Porter, John Szwed, and others. There are so
many critics out there who have their own voices. The field of jazz criticism
is very much alive, and a lot of important work has been done over the past
thirty years. When I was growing up, jazz biography was almost unheard of.
The few that existed were crap -- they read like ersatz novels. Now there
is an upsurge is real scholarship. Are there idiots out there too? That goes
without saying. But on balance, I'd be very proud to be counted among those
I've mentioned.
JJM
We are living in the days where everyone can be a critic. "Do it yourself"
reviews are available on Amazon.com and on many popular web sites, jazz sites
included. How do you feel about that?
GG There used to be a magazine that did that.
I think it was called Different Drummer. It was inexpensive looking,
all white with black print, and very little art work as I recall -- all amateur
stuff. I hated it! Criticism isn't an amateur pursuit, it's a serious craft,
sometimes raised to an art. Don't get me wrong, I'm very interested in opinions
-- I get letters all the time from readers who know a lot more than I do
-- but criticism goes beyond opinion. It's a literary, not a musical pursuit,
and something you have to work at.
You know, a Stanley Crouch may say something you think is preposterous, but
he has earned the right to say it, if for no other reason than because he
has lived his whole life inside this music. He has spent more time in clubs
than almost anybody else I know. If this is a conclusion that he comes to,
he has the right to say it, and you have to give him respect even as you
disagree. I don't feel that way about some guy who owns eleven records and
once went to a show at the Village Vanguard. I am just not that interested.
One difference between professional and amateur critics is that amateurs
almost always prefer to write about themselves -- "the first time I heard
this record" kind of thing. Jesus, sometimes I'm tempted to do it myself,
and I go a little overboard in that direction in the intro to my next book.
Maybe it's a consequence of getting older. But you do try to keep a lid on
it; when a writer begins to see the artists he writes about as supporting
characters in his own life, he's in trouble. Perception outweighs memory.
_________________
THE BLINDFOLD TEST
Editors Note: During the Blindfold Test, Giddins was sent short
excerpts of essays written by prominent jazz writers dating as far back as
the fifties. These excerpts were delivered to him one at a time via email
during our telephone conversation. He had no warning this test was
going to take place, and no hints were given unless he asked for them.
Readers who wish to play along can do so by choosing a name from the drop-down
menu provided under each excerpt below.
*
JJM Gary, I am going to email you excerpts from essays written by well-known jazz writers. Take a minute to read them over and then tell me who you think they are.
Excerpt #1
|
"It was almost impossible for a man to be as much of a technician, artist, and explorer as Coltrane and still have the kind of popular following that he had. What did he tell the audience? I don't know, of course. And perhaps as a white man, I can't know. But I would venture a suggestion. I don't think Coltrane spoke of society or politics. I think that like all artists, he spoke of things of the spirit, those things by which the soul of man survives. I think he spoke of the ways of the demons and the gods that were always there, yet are always contemporary. And I think he knew that he did."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #2
|
"There's almost a touching belief in music as a cleansing, purifying, liberating force, as if jazzmen were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They all want to change the social system through their music."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #3
|
"Most of them (critics) cannot read music or play a musical instrument with any degree of skill. It is a simple truth that there are thousands of high school music students around the country who know more music theory than our leading jazz critics."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #4
|
"In the red and purple bric-a-brac that often passes for jazz criticism or jazz scholarship, Charlie Parker looms large. He is the rebel speared by the marksman of the marketplace, and by the grand conspiracy of robed and unidentified klansmen."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #5
|
"In a sense the term cultists for the adherents of early modern jazz was correct. The music, bebop, defined the term of a deeply felt noncomformity among many young Americans, black and white. And for many young Negroes the irony of being thought "weird" or "deep" by white Americans was as satisfying as it was amusing. It also put on a more intellectually and psychologically satisfying level the traditional separation and isolation of the black man from America. It was a cult of protection as well as rebellion."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #6
|
"Parker operated in the underworld of American culture, on that turbulent level where human instincts conflict with social institutions; where contemporary civilized values and hypocricies are challenged by the Dionysian urges of a between-wars youth born to prosperity, conditioned by the threat of world destruction, and inspired -- when not seeking total anarchy -- by a need to bring social reality and our social pretensions into a more meaningful balance."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #7
|
"It is perhaps a coincidence that one of Thelonious Monk's favorite tunes is a nineteenth-century Protestant hymn by a composer named William H. Monk. Not only the composer's name, but also the title of the piece, "Abide With Me," seems perfectly fitting for Thelonious. We suspect that Monk himself always knew what he was doing, or at least what he wanted to be able to do. The same can hardly be said for the world around him. Yet, there were always a few who did abide with Thelonious, and made it possible for him to go his own way."
|
Giddins's answer
Excerpt #8
|
On Pee Wee Russell "No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition. His solos didn't always arrive at their original destination. He took wild improvisational chances, and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground. His singular tone was never at rest. He had a rich chalumeau register, a piping upper register, and a whining middle register, and when he couldn't think of anything else to do, he growled."
|
Giddins's answer
_______________________________
Gary Giddins products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This conversation took place on June 20, 2003
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read Blues For Clement Greenberg, a discussion on jazz criticism with Stanley Crouch, Martha Bayles and Loren Schoenberg.
*
Conversations with Gary Giddins
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
The Gary Giddins web site
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