Gary Giddins' new book:
Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century has just been published by Oxford University Press. This is a 680 + page book of a compilation of Gary's articles for the Village Voice.
Here are some of the early reviews:
San Jose Mercury News
Jazz voice distinctive in 'Weather Bird'
BY RICHARD SCHEININ
21 November 2004
Copyright 2004 The Wichita Eagle. All rights reserved.
"Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century" by Gary Giddins
(Oxford, $35)
In his addictive new anthology, Gary Giddins identifies Louis Armstrong as the original jazz revolutionary. He was a paradigm shifter: "In Armstrong's world, it was no longer sufficient to merely master the trumpet or saxophone; instead," Giddins writes, "jazz musicians adapted their instruments as extensions of themselves, making each solo as distinct as a signature or fingerprint." After a century, jazz has produced thousands of these amazingly
distinctive instrumental voices: They cry, murmur, scream, declaim, float, inspire and turn listeners into religious devotees. Yet the critical outpouring that mirrors jazz's development -- analyzing, describing, bashing, pronouncing, promoting -- has produced few genuine voices on the printed page.
Giddins has a voice. It's full of bold assertions and blunt putdowns. He loves the music to death -- that feeling oozes through these 600-plus pages, though Giddins balances emotion with intellect, as does jazz itself. He's a scholarly fanatic, obsessing on the music endlessly, at times comically, fusing a school kid's ebullience to dissertation-like detail. He seems to work as hard at understanding the music as musicians do at mastering jazz's labyrinthine systems.
"Weather Bird" gathers many of Giddins' writings from 1990 to 2003, when he ended a 30-year stint at the Village Voice. His Voice column, from which much of the anthology is drawn, was titled "Weather Bird" in homage to Armstrong's seminal side of that name, a 1928 duet with pianist Earl Hines. On that track, valiant young Armstrong gauged all the music's possibilities -- everything blowing in the wind -- then flew off in bold new directions.
And as a boy in the early '60s, Giddins says in his introduction, he "found in Louis Armstrong specifically and in jazz in general a substitute for the God of my fathers." Clicking with Armstrong, Giddins clicked with the music in the broadest sense. In fact, his book is an antidote to jazz parochialism: A 15-page virtuoso history of the jazz avant-garde is followed by a portrait of Bing Crosby (about whom Giddins wrote a biography, published in 2001).
All the streams of jazz, all its weather systems, are charted here in reviews, essays and portraits that range from Rosemary Clooney to Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, John Lewis, Clark Terry, Lester Bowie, Bill Charlap, David Murray, Jason Moran, Wynton Marsalis and Cecil Taylor, to name a handful.
It may sound like a hodgepodge, but it isn't. Giddins is as illuminating about grand old Benny Carter ("the last member of a sextet of innovative musicians, all associated with jazz, who established the saxophone as an expressive, dominant instrument in 20th-century music") as he is about granite-splintering saxophone spiritualist David S. Ware, whose quartet he anoints "the best small band in jazz today... it flushes the competition from memory."
Giddins connects the dots between Irving Berlin and Sun Ra and picks up on new trends before they reach most people's radar. Giddins has his biases: Among modern jazz revolutionaries, he much prefers Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman to John Coltrane, who is accused of "steamrolling ardor." And after 30 years in New York, Giddins is a fighter in the jazz wars, too easily dismissing Wynton Marsalis as "the quintessential superstar for an art overwhelmed by its past." Jazz has become a marginalized music with "a following so cult-like that it barely creases national consciousness," Giddins writes in a closing essay. Yet the music is annually replenished by "a stream of new blood." It will survive, he predicts, because new players "embody
the same spark of obstinate originality and defiant pleasure" as their
forebears.
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from Publishers Weekly
Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century
Giddins, Gary (Author) ISBN: 0195156072 Oxford University Press
Published 2004-11 Hardcover , $35.00 (688p)
Genres & Styles - Jazz; History & Criticism - General Ages Reviewed 2004-11-08
In 146 lively essays, articles and reviews, most of them written for
his Weather Bird column in the Village Voice, critic Giddins surveys
the jazz scene from 1990 to 2003. He covers concerts, recordings and
jazz festivals, and considers new artists as well as older singers and
instrumentalists (e.g., Doc Cheatham, Rosemary Clooney, Benny Carter)
and those long gone but brought to life on reissued recordings (e.g.,
Billie Holiday, the Boswell sisters and especially Louis Armstrong,
whose seminal place in jazz is underscored by the book's title, which
comes from the famous Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines duet). Designed
to be a companion volume to Giddins's landmark reference, Visions of
Jazz, the volume offers an overview of jazz's avant-garde and
discussions of dozens of familiar contemporary artists and relative
newcomers, such as pianists Bill Charlap and Jason Moran. Giddins pays
tribute to two deceased critics, Martin Williams and Leonard Feather,
and praises engineer Robert Parker for his pioneering work in
recovering the best sound from remastered 78s. As a reviewer, Giddins
is opinionated but generous, with the laudable ability to capture the
essence of a performer's style in vibrant language that makes the
music described seem almost audible. In a final essay, he outlines the
history of jazz and shows that, contrary to some opinions, the form is
very much alive.
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