Some books are meant to be read and some books are meant to be referred to. Gary Giddins's Visions of Jazz, which won a bevy of awards in 1998, belongs in the first category. Jazz, an encyclopedic undertaking co-written with jazz historian Scott DeVeaux, falls into the second. It is vast, thorough, illuminating, thought-provoking, beautifully written and very entertaining. It is also dense, demanding and fundamentally a scholarly text.
From the outset, the authors make no concession to the contemporary reading public's notoriously short attention span. They do not write in sound bites and they do not write for idiots. Their first chapter deals with timbre, rhythm, meter, melody, scales, harmony, texture, "licks," "riffs," motives and modes, and also explains the way musical instruments can be modified to make sounds they were not originally meant to produce. The book presumes a level of sophistication and intelligence among readers that may be overly optimistic in this neo-Ostrogothian age.
Giddins, for many years The Village Voice's jazz critic, and DeVeaux, a fixture at the University of Virginia, have written a superb textbook, the kind that anyone interested in the history of jazz would be well advised to read. But it is a textbook all the same. Jazz is a linear, straightforward history of an art form that is increasingly referred to as "America's classical music." This is a polite but basically unhelpful term that simultaneously pays homage to the art form while treating it like an inanimate object that belongs in a museum. The museum of musical taxidermy in question would presumably be curated by Wynton Marsalis, an industrious self-promoter many jazz lovers view more as an archivist, proselytizer and keeper of the flame than as an innovator. In fact, the museum already exists in Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis's well-intentioned but oddly stultifying Temple of Swing that titans like Sonny Rollins have avoided, presumably because they still believe that jazz belongs in clubs, concert halls and even parks, but not in elegant mausoleums.
Jazz discusses every serious trend in the history of the idiom, from funeral music to acid jazz, and provides brief biographies of all the major instrumentalists and composers. It explains why John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong are important in a way that Grover Washington Jr. and George Benson and Chet Baker are not. It directs the reader to specific tracks on specific records and walks the reader through the ways each number develops. This is quite instructive, and even fun, but it also reinforces the notion that Jazz is less a narrative than a primer.
Giddins and DeVeaux are critics in the purest sense of the word, in that they are not afraid to make judgments about the quality of this or that performance, or even of this or that career. They refer to Marsalis as "the ultimate Reagan-era musician" and blame that president for the demise of free jazz and the public's increasing preference for recordings made by people who are long dead over CDs made by musicians who are still trying to pay the rent. Discussing Kenny G and other cultural saboteurs, they write: "There are many things to dislike about smooth jazz - for example, everything." Smooth jazz, which rips the guts out of music and turns it into a laxative, is an easy target for Giddins and DeVeaux. But just because ridiculing Kenny G is a clear-cut case of shooting fish in a barrel doesn't alter the fact that Kenny G and all of his smooth jazz confederates are fish that badly need shooting.
Giddins and DeVeaux make readers think about jazz in new ways. They note that the city of New Orleans has never lost its mythological status as the birthplace of jazz even though virtually everything important that has happened in the idiom in the past 90 years took place in Manhattan. Marsalis himself was born in New Orleans, but he became famous in New York. And Ellington, a native of Washington, deliberately moved jazz away from its Southern roots, "channelling the city's cosmopolitanism" into something "smart, urban, fast moving, glittery, independent and motivated." The authors also point out that most of the great white jazz artists are members of ethnic minorities, and not WASPs. Actually, it should not come as that much of a surprise that raucous, ebullient foot-stomping music has never been the calling card of people named Ashton or Gwyneth.
Jazz is filled with delightful minutiae. Benny Goodman, the apotheosis of sophistication, grew up in the slums of Chicago, the son of a Polish immigrant who worked in the stockyards. Count Basie, the personification of Kansas City jazz, grew up in Red Bank, N.J. Duke Ellington hated the word "jazz," sometimes referring to his work as "Negro folk music." Baritone sax colossus Harry Carney started playing with Ellington when he was just 17, and died four months after his boss, "some said of bereavement." Carney, like other members of Ellington's band, referred to the Duke as "Dumpy" because of his extraordinarily relaxed manner backstage. Charlie Parker earned the nickname "Bird" after he served his fellow musicians a flattened chicken one of the band's vehicles had run over earlier in the day. Jaco Pastorious, who anchored Weather Report, was the first sideman to play the electric bass exclusively, scorning the upright model. In retrospect, this may not have been such a good thing.
Someone, possibly Cole Porter, said that all songs are sad. Ditto most musicians' lives. Scott Joplin, who laid the groundwork for jazz, caught syphilis at a young age and died in a mental hospital. Buddy Bolden, who actually did invent jazz, also died in a mental institution. Jelly Roll Morton, who made the first truly great jazz recordings, was first ridiculed and then almost completely forgotten by the time he breathed his last in 1941. King Oliver, who gave Louis Armstrong his big break, died penniless working as a Georgia pool-room janitor, long since unable to play his trumpet because of rotting gums. Drugs claimed Parker, Coltrane, Billy Holliday, Baker and many others long before their time.
The history of jazz is in many ways the history of man's triumph over adversity, or more accurately, the black man' - and woman's - triumph over adversity. It is more adversity than any rock star can even imagine enduring. Ellington achieved lift-off after he appeared at the Cotton Club in December, 1927. The Cotton Club, located in Harlem, was not open to blacks. Kenny Chesney never had to deal with this kind of stuff. Much less Kenny G.
Joe Queenan is a writer based in Tarrytown, N.Y. His memoir Closing Time will be published in paperback in March.