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2007: Jazz encounters of the literary kind
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Posted by: eJazzNews Readeron Tuesday, January 01, 2008 - 11:08 AM |
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By John Stevenson
The year 2007 was a great year for high-quality books about jazz. I did not get to read as many of them as I would have liked, but some titles stood out for being beacons of attractive penmanship.
One doesn’t have to look any further than Ben Ratliff’s insightful John Coltrane disquisition, “The Story of Sound” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) or Ashley Kahn’s revelatory investigations into “Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece” (Da Capo).
Across the pond here in London, noted saxophonist and well-regarded commentator Dave Gelly, turned his attention to one of jazz music’s great luminaries, Lester Young, a.k.a. ‘The President’.
“Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young” (Equinox Press), is remarkably accessible to jazz buff and non-aficionado alike, meticulously researched and filled with great anecdotes and accounts from a host of musicians associated with the dapperly-dressed jazzman who died tragically early at the age of 50 (1909-1959). Gelly traces the trajectory of Young’s storied career through his early years in Algiers, New Orleans, to his tenure in his father’s territory bands across a racially-hostile America. Young’s associations with Count Basie and Billie Holiday and more importantly, his unique stylistic development as a major contributor to the tenor saxophone jazz tradition, receive excellent treatment in Gelly’s eloquent literary testimonial. Young’s increasingly diffident and withdrawn disposition towards the end of his life – reflecting itself in a dark and moody tone on his instrument - is also sensitively captured. A music lover’s bookshelf will be incomplete without this important slender volume.
Though its been in print for the last three years, I only recently discovered a most alluring biography in Coleridge Goode’s “Bass Lines: A Life in Jazz” (Northway), which is actually Goode’s musical life-story as told to Roger Cotterrell. If there is any jazzman alive in Britain today who can provide eyewitness accounts of jazz over a period spanning the 1930s right up to the 1980s, it is undoubtedly the Jamaican-born Goode (1919 - ), who first arrived in Glasgow in 1934, as an engineering student. In his inimitable measured and articulate manner Goode describes his early days in the balmy comfort of a nurturing middle-class family on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, immersed in classical music and violin studies. An important artistic gear change takes place in Scotland when Goode switches to contrabass and finds jazz irresistible, eventually moving down to London to play and record with the likes of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and securing a solid reputation as a bass player of choice with a long roster of performers such as Lauderic Caton, and Ray Ellington. Perhaps most significant in Bass Lines is Goode’s story of being a charter member of fellow-Jamaican Joe Harriott’s quintet, long considered a seismic moment in the British and European artistic epicentre of the 1960s. It is not all sweetness and light: the joys of collective improvisation are detailed alongside experiences of racial discrimination. Tales of the destructive effects of drug use among musicians also feature inescapably in Goode’s biography.
Perhaps one of the most under-explored aspects of jazz literature is fiction. There is an abundance of jazz product in the form of audio and DVD formatted recordings tumbling out on to the record store shelves and on the internet. There has also been a growing body of novels and short story work that makes jazz musicians a central theme. Los Angeles-based jazz chanteuse, writer and visual artist Angela Carole Brown belongs securely to this tradition. Her recent novel “Trading Fours” (Infinity Publishing) is set in a day in the lives of four LA musicians who make their living hacking away at an artistic seam called the ‘casual’. Whether it is corporate social events, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and miscellaneous events calling for musicians-for-hire, Nick, Seth, Chloe, and Tristan take them all in their rhythmic stride – and still have to deal with the workaday issues of paying the bills and the rent and negotiating the minefields of personal relationships. Trading Fours deals with brilliant musicians who, oftentimes because of their lack of being well-connected, do not get the breaks they deserve.
Trading Fours is in few respects, a triumphant meeting ground of art and sociology - a meeting ground as familiar in 2007 as it was in 1927, and one which it is hoped will receive even more insight and attention in 2008 and beyond.
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