December 19, 2004
'Living With Jazz': It Does Mean a Thing
By ALFRED APPEL JR.
LIVING WITH JAZZ
By Dan Morgenstern.
Edited by Sheldon Meyer.
Pantheon Books. 712 pp. $35.
AN MORGENSTERN has been writing about jazz for more than four decades but has long hesitated to collect his best pieces. At last, ''Living With Jazz'' gathers 136 of his liner notes, critical essays and other writings, and the book is a cause for celebration since it deserves to be on the short shelf of essential books on the music.
The sections collecting record reviews and accounts of concerts constitute a compelling documentary record of often thrilling performances, most notably from the 1950's and 60's -- the last time musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk would enjoy wide popularity (all were on the cover of Time). Jazz itself could be termed popular music only during the swing era, in its big-band incarnation as dance music. Radio, now lost to adult music, made swing, Bing and Toscanini popular; Armstrong even had his own radio show.
Morgenstern's liner notes transcend the shallow, if not promotional, nature of the genre and manage to blend keen musical analysis with biographical commentary. He has mastered this balance while setting the standard for the kind of expanded program notes made possible by boxed LP sets and the advent of booklets with compact discs. All of his writing is enriched by his extraordinary command and recall of recorded jazz.
Morgenstern's fluent, unmannered narrative style is ideally suited to the profile form; with Whitney Balliett, he is as sensitive as any critic has been to the human side of the jazz scene. He writes with particular warmth and acuity about musicians like Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell and Milt Hinton. He is both lyrical and critically persuasive on Lester Young, arguing against prevailing negative opinion in favor of Young's late recordings, his personal travails notwithstanding.
The opening section, ''Armstrong and Ellington,'' is the book's strongest. Eleven essays, written over many years, cohere to form a first-rate survey of Ellington's career. The eight reviews and essays on Armstrong collectively reveal that no one has written better or more lovingly about Satchmo. Morgenstern's 1994 essay ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' actually covers Armstrong's entire lifetime and is the best short introduction to the man who, he writes, ''spread love, happiness and beauty.'' Morgenstern's laser-beam memory locates musical sources for the bebop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in Armstrong recordings from 1929. As Miles Davis said, ''You can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played -- even modern.''
The year 1929 was also epochal for Armstrong, who, in a successful bid for a wider audience, abandoned his small recording group with its traditional jazz repertory in favor of a big band that featured him performing Tin Pan Alley songs like ''Star Dust'' and ''Body and Soul'' instead of successors to the purely instrumental ''Potato Head Blues'' (1927). ''A sellout!'' wailed jazz purists and commissars. This monolithic myopia went unchallenged until Morgenstern began attacking it, most assertively in liner notes to a 1969 reissue of 1930-32 recordings; he argued that Armstrong's art peaked in the 1930's. Soon, Armstrong's best recordings from 1935 to 1943, ignored in the jazz literature, were made available to Armstrong enthusiasts who had never heard about them, let alone listened to them -- magnificent recordings like ''Ev'ntide,'' ''Jubilee,'' ''Lyin' to Myself,'' ''Swing That Music'' and ''I Double Dare You.'' Morgenstern's pivotal role in the second coming of this radiant body of great American music is comparable to Malcolm Cowley's in his 1946 anthology ''The Portable Faulkner,'' which prompted the reissue of out-of-print novels like ''The Sound and the Fury,'' ''As I Lay Dying'' and ''Light in August.''
Although Armstrong is now called iconic and canonical -- recognized as our greatest jazz figure -- he and Faulkner may well be in the same boat, cut off from any substantial audience by the vast surround of popular culture. We know that Faulkner now belongs to unpopular culture -- that is, read only when assigned in class. But we have no idea if the young are even listening to Armstrong, who died in 1971. Jazz should henceforth be labeled ''art music,'' because this would clearly mean that if it is to survive, it must be disseminated in classrooms and institutions like the proposed Jazz Museum in Harlem. Jazz curriculums continue to be developed for every level. Morgenstern, since 1976 the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, never mentions jazz education, curiously enough. However, his essay ''Satchmo and the Critics'' offers a valuable pedagogic documentary record, with ample quotations from the surprisingly harsh criticism Armstrong endured throughout his long career.
Although literary scholars customarily consider the most compromising and vexing aspects of their subjects in an unblinking fashion, jazz writers like Morgenstern often seem advocates as much as critics, their defensiveness easily understood in the context of cultural if not racial snobbery. But now that Ellington, Armstrong and their peers have won the respect and close attention of musicologists, cultural critics and pedagogues alike, they should be considered with the complexity they deserve. How good are Ellington's extended works? What does one make of his so-called ''jungle music,'' black musicians making eccentric animal-like sounds on their horns? Is it a form of modernist irony -- primitivist condescension upended? Morgenstern is not alone in ducking such hard questions. And what do we make of Armstrong's persona of joy, ebullient and ingratiating? This minstrelsy aspect of Armstrong is crucial, although ignored or de-emphasized by friendly critics like Morgenstern.
Ideally, the bracing art of jazz would help to reduce or neutralize the nihilistic spell cast by current popular culture, from the aestheticized mayhem of action movies to the misogyny of hip-hop. ''Thanks a Million,'' Armstrong sang in 1935, wearing his heart on his sleeve, which is why we turn to jazz, why we need it.
Alfred Appel Jr.'s most recent book is ''Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce.''
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