More to come -
“Prologue
Jazz??
What kind of jazz are we talking about?
A comedian on a late-night talk show did a bit about the awfulness of dating. He said the two worst date ideas he'd ever heard from a woman each consisted of two words: "art walk" and "jazz brunch."
A century ago, jazz was feared and reviled by respectable society because it was Black music. Because it threatened to expose innocent young white people to all that white society imagined and feared about Blackness, sexual abandon being at the top of the list.
Jazz today, when it isn't utterly ignored, is widely disliked for different reasons: because it is old, or anodyne, or hard to understand. Jazz is passe. Jazz is niche. Jazz is the smooth soundtrack to polite brunches in restaurants with potted ferns and bananas Foster and clever young servers. Or it is just loudly squeaking and honking saxophones—noise.
I speak of jazz as an awesome thing. An imperative, an empire. As America's only native art form, one that boiled forth from a gumbo of
ethnic musics in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans and coursed up rivers and railroads and blue highways to Oklahoma City and Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago and New York City, irresistibly, as young men and women, Black then (very quickly) white, became transfixed by its power and seized on it as an unprecedented form of artistic expression.
Geniuses came forth. Waves and waves of them: Buddy Bolden and Scott Joplin and James Reese Europe and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke and Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake and Willie '"Hie Lion" Smith and . . .
The three geniuses at this book's heart were born when jazz was already thirty or forty years old; they rose up at the end of World War II, when the big bands of the twenties and thirties and forties were starting to die out, when the idea of jazz as dance music was starting to fade, and something else, jazz as art music, as listening music, was starting to take hold.
With the death of jazz as dance music, the art began to contract. With the movement known as bebop — hard to play and, initially, hard to understand, even for jazz musicians — jazz's already shrinking audience shrank even more severely. (Although when bebop's cofounder, the incomparable alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, released albums on which — quite beautifully, if not audaciously — he played standard ballads accompanied by strings, the audience grew.)
And then, as time and popular culture moved mercilessly forward, bebop came to seem, for jazz's diminished yet passionate audience, foundational, comprehensible, moving, lyrical. And the jazz that followed bebop, known to those who required categories by the under-descriptive, even misleading, label of hard bop, seemed still more comprehensible and lyrical.
Other categories would follow, but I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all of jazz that I want and need. I find magnificent art produced by what bebop's other co creator, Dizzy Gillespie, called in a slightly different context superroyalty—magnificent men (mostly men and mostly Black) of supreme gifts and regal mien, creating masterpiece after masterpiece.
Not antique, not anodyne, not forbiddingly difficult, and viscerally thrilling.
And with all respect to this book's presiding genius Miles Davis, who late in his career proclaimed that he had no interest in returning to the lyrical masterpieces he produced and participated in between ages eighteen and thirty-five (1944 to 1961), saying that to him revisiting that music would be like eating leftover turkey — with all respect to Miles, the thrill of this great and never-fading music is this book's pulse.”
