© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all
rights reserved.
The editorial
staff at JazzProfiles subscribed to The
JazzLetter for many years.
Its author, Gene Lees , who died in April, 2010 at the age of
eighty-two, published The JazzLetter
in monthly editions of 6-8 manuscript-sized, printed pages and mailed them to
his subscribers.
Gene would often
get behind in his efforts to put it out on a monthly basis and a clump of them
would sometimes arrive in one envelope.
Who cared.
Whenever one or more copies of The
JazzLetter hit my mailbox, it marked a joyous occasion as I was about to be
transported into some aspect of the world of Jazz and its makers by Gene Lees , whom Glen Woodcock of the Toronto Sun once labeled: “… the best
writer on Jazz in the world today.”
Although, Tim
Berners-Lee devised the first web browser and server at CERN and launched the World Wide Web in August,
1991, about ten years after Gene began publishing The JazzLetter in 1981, the
publication never made an appearance on the world-wide-web.
Irrespective of
the fact that The JazzLetter never
went digital, I have always thought of it as the first Jazz blog.
Perhaps after you
read this account from Gene’s introduction to his Cats of Any Color compilation
on the origins of The JazzLetter you,
too, might agree that the publication deserves to be considered in this
fashion.
Also, when you
read Gene’s account of how it all began, you may get a sense of nostalgia at
the thought that such a time will never come again.
© - Gene
Lees /Da Capo Press, copyright protected; all
rights reserved.
“Often it will be
found that someone speaks a third language with the accent of the second. My
Spanish, for example, has a French accent. Gene Kelly spoke French with a
slight Italian accent. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia
Over the years, I
have also observed that anyone who has had two professions practices the
second with the disciplines and outlook of the first. You can see this in
movie-makers. Directors who were first actors elicit fine work from their
performers—for example, Richard Attenborough. Consider the miraculous
performance he got from Robert Downey, Jr. as the English Charles Chaplin. Or
the performances Robert Redford gets from actors, as in Ordinary People and A River
Runs Through It. Or Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell, both of whom had been
actors, in any number of pictures.
Alfred Hitchcock,
who early manifested a skill in things mechanical, went to work for a telegraph
company, then broke into the film industry as a tide-card illustrator. His
pictures were always visual, mechanical, and short on great acting, no matter
the idolatry toward his pictures fashionable in film circles. He was quoted as
saying that actors should be treated like cattle, and his movies look like
filmed storyboards. David Lean began as a film editor, and though his films—The Bridge on the River Kwai - for
example— reflect prodigious gifts for working with actors, they also reveal his
first training in that they are magnificently, meticulously photographed and
edited.
I was trained as
an artist, but my first profession was journalism. I had been a newspaper
reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for ten years before I became the
editor of Down Beat in April, 1959,
and a thirst for factuality would stay with me. I looked the magazine over and
sent a memo to staff members and contributors saying that its first duty was to
be a good magazine, literate and readable. If it did not fulfill that
obligation, it could not serve its subject matter well. I also urged a concern
for factuality, in contrast to the opinion-mongering that comprised much, even
most, of jazz criticism, and still does. To say something is exciting or boring
or touching or disturbing is only to confess what excites, bores, touches, or
disturbs you. It is not a fact about the work of art in question, it is a fact
about the critic, a projection of his
or her own character and experience.
I did what everyone
did at Down Beat: I wrote record
reviews. Projecting your opinions in print is the fastest way in the world to
alienate the victims of your inescapable subjectivity. In any case, unless you
are like Addison DeWitt in All About Eve
and enjoy causing pain, writing criticism ain't your thing. So I fired myself
as a record reviewer soon after joining the magazine. I have written very, very
little jazz criticism, which is why I was in early years discomfited to see
myself referred to as a jazz critic, later embarrassed, and finally resigned
to it.
My education in
jazz came not from magazines and books but from studies of composition, piano
(with Tony Aless, among others), and guitar—and from long, rich conversations
in such places as Jim and Andy's bar in New York with Phil Woods, Gerry
Mulligan, Ben Webster, Cole-man Hawkins, Hank d'Amico, Will Bradley, Jimmy
McPartland, Lockjaw Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, J.J. Johnson, and many
more. I found that jazz history, as it was generally accepted, was to a large
extent a fiction that has been agreed upon, as Voltaire said of all history. It
dawned on me that, since such founding figures as Louis Armstrong and Earl
Hines were still with us, I had met nearly all the great jazz musicians who had
ever lived, and knew some of them, such as Bill Evans and Woody Herman,
intimately. At the same time, because of my activities as a lyricist, I met and
in some cases came to know many of the major songwriters who had inspired and
influenced me, including Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz, Harold Arlen, Johnny
Green, Hoagie Carmichael, Mitchell Parrish, Harry Warren, and particularly
Johnny Mercer, someone else who became a close friend.
After leaving Down Beat toward the end of 1961, I
settled in New York Toronto Southern California , where I have remained ever since, the
climate being one of its blandishments. By the end of the 1970s, my songs had
been recorded by Mabel Mercer, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan (my
dear, dear friend!), Ella Fitzgerald,Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Carmen McRae,
Peggy Lee (another dear friend), and so many others that my royalties, at least
in theory, made it possible for me to retire, and I tried. I soon found that I
missed my friends, among them all the jazz musicians I had come to know since
1959.
On a morning in
May, 1981, I sent a questionnaire to several hundred persons, asking whether I
should start a letter—not a newsletter, giving record reviews, nightclub
listings, and current news, but a letter on matters of interest to all of us. I
specified that it would contain no advertising. Within a week, I had a mailbox
full of letters urging me to do it, some of them containing checks. I realized
that I was committed. Broadcaster Fred Hall and composer-pianist-arranger Roger Kellaway gave the Jazzletter its name. I
still remember the list of early subscribers. It included Phil Woods, Gerry
Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Shelly Manne, Benny Carter, Jimmy
Rowles, John Lewis, Art Farmer, Kenny Wheeler, Kenny Drew, Sahib Shihab, Rob
McConnell, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel, Julius La Rosa, Jackie and Roy Kral,
Robert Farnon, and Audrey Morris, such record-company executives as Charles
Lourie, Bruce Lundvall, and Ken Clancy, and a number of critics and jazz
historians, including Whitney Balliett, Doug Ramsey, Grover Sales, James
Lincoln Collier, Philip Elwood, and the late Leonard Feather, as well as
academics.
The Jazzletter addressed a list of subscribers almost all
of whom I knew personally. It was written for musicians, dealing with matters
that concern musicians—jazz musicians to a large extent but not exclusively. I
did not design it to exclude laymen, and indeed whenever technical discussions
proved necessary, tried to make them as clear and brief as possible. But in
general, the publication assumed a measure of knowledge in its readers. I asked
guitarist and composer Mundell Lowe what he thought the limits of Jazzletter subject matter should be. He
said, "Anything that is of interest to us"
And what was of
acute interest to jazz musicians was the history of the music and its makers,
whether one of the older players and the era he or she had lived through, or
younger ones, anxious to know about the times they did not know. And given that
I faced no limits in length, I was able to write extended pieces that simply
would not be practical in most magazines for structural reasons. I soon found
that I was recording the life stories, derived from extended interviews, of
musicians who might deserve book-length biographies but were unlikely to get
them, the nature of publishing being what it is. I found myself writing what I
came to think of as mini-biographies.
In time, Oxford University
Press published four anthologies of these essays, each of them gathered loosely
around a central theme. Cats of Any Color was the fourth of
these collections. Cassell has published a fifth, Arranging the Score, Yale
University Press is publishing a sixth, and a seventh is pending. I know of no
other publication that has produced a comparable quantity of anthologized
material. Two of the books received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.”
Thanks to the
collective efforts of many Jazz bloggers, the spirit of The Jazzletter lives on
today in a variety of digital formats.
But for those of
us who looked forward to that thud hitting the front door mat announcing that
Gene had sent out another batch of his inimitable Jazzletter essays, musings and commentaries, there will never be
anything quite like it again.
