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Living with Jazz: A reader edited by Sheldon Meyer, by Dan Morgenstern
Download PDF Living with Jazz: A reader edited by Sheldon Meyer, by Dan Morgenstern
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A collection of essays, biographical profiles, and critical analyses by one of the twentieth century's leading jazz writers includes commentary on the work of jazz entertainers, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, as well as assessment of the role of jazz in contemporary culture and its influence on modern music.
- Sales Rank: #729896 in Books
- Published on: 2004-11-16
- Released on: 2004-11-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.52" h x 1.62" w x 6.34" l, 2.27 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 736 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Former editor of Metronome, Jazz and Downbeat, Morgenstern has been one of jazz's most passionate observers and chroniclers, particularly during its last major flowerings in the '60s and '70s. Longtime Oxford University Press editor Meyer gathers nearly half a century of Morgenstern's profiles, liner notes, record and show reviews and other musings in this definitive compilation. Morgenstern reminisces about his introduction to jazz in a brief opening memoir, then segues into lengthy sections on his greatest heroes, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Liner notes introduce records by everyone from Ma Rainey to Joe Lovano; essays include a survey of the history of recorded jazz and considerations of jazz's relationship to theater, dance, film and television. Morgenstern has known most of the musicians he discusses, and he depicts them all with insight and affection, from his rollicking account of the career of lovable "Hot Lips" Page to his sensitive portraits of self-effacing Pee Wee Russell and eccentric Lester Young. Often he lets the artists speak for themselves, as when Bill Evans articulates his thoughts on the "intellectual" qualities of his music. Now the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Morgenstern is generous in his assessments of performers and performances, and his exuberant characterizations make this monumental volume a stimulating guide to jazz in the second half of the 20th century.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Besides writing for and editing jazz journals, Morgenstern has promoted concerts, worked at record companies, and taught and managed jazz education. Rather than a critic--though he is certainly evocative and convincing in his evaluation of music and musicians--he is a contemporary chronicler, a Boswell of jazz. He discovered jazz in his native Austria, and he says in the autobiographical introduction to his massive gathering of articles, reviews, album-liner notes, and other fugitive writings that jazz helped sustain him when, as a child and teenager, he and his mother fled the Nazi Anschluss and spent the war in Scandinavia before reunification with his father in the U.S. Sincerity and generosity of spirit illuminate his personal remarks and carry through to his description of and reflections on the great musicians he has known, worked with, and loved. While there is something good on every page, the pieces on jazz recording and discography constitute an especially valuable part of this lovable book. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Armstrong and Ellington
He never was billed as the King of Jazz, but Louis Armstrong is the sole legitimate claimant to that musical throne. Without him, there would still be the music we call jazz, but how it might have developed is guesswork. He was the key creator of its mature vocabulary, and though nearly three-quarters of a century have passed since his influence first manifested itself, there is still not one musician partaking of the jazz tradition who does not, knowingly or unknowingly, make use of something created by Louis Armstrong.
For those who basked in the living presence of Armstrong, it is sobering to contemplate that we are at a point in the history of jazz where many among us know him only in his posthumous audiovisual incarnation, and many, alas, not even that well--unable instantly to recognize that voice, that trumpet sound, that face, that smile. Our age consumes even the most consummate art at such a pace that Armstrong's universality is no longer a given. Yet the infinite reproducibility of his recorded works ensures his immortality, and future generations will surely come to know that jazz and Louis Armstrong are synonymous. The language he created is a marvelously
flexible and expandable one that can be spoken in ever so many accents, and as long as it remains a living tongue, it will refer back to its creator.
So if you are someone who is hearing the music in this collection for the first time--and that is an enviable way to discover what took some of us years of searching for rare old records, a few at a time--it will be most surprising if there are not familiar strains in it. Miles Davis knew what he was talking about.
By all odds, Louis Armstrong, born out of wedlock on August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, raised in the city's poorest quarter, out of school and working for a living before he'd finished fifth grade, was not slated to become world-famous. Yet against all odds, he not only survived but thrived. Sent to reform school at age twelve, he learned the fundamentals of music there and by the time he was sixteen was able to supplement his income from work as a longshoreman or day laborer by playing his cornet on weekends in such rough joints as the Brick House, where, as he tells us in his autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, "Levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and
into the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn."
Indeed there was not much that ever fazed Louis Armstrong. He was blessed with a perfect physique for blowing that most demanding of instruments, the trumpet (actually a cornet for the first decade or so, but as we shall see, the difference is slight), and with a perfect disposition for making his way in the toughest of
environments. "Little Louis," the first nickname he was known by, could be tough when required but mostly made friends wherever he went. He credited his maternal grandmother--the one permanent adult presence in his early childhood years--with instilling in him the system of values that would carry him through his extraordinary life and enable him to confront with equanimity situations and experiences he could not have imagined in his youth. As he describes them, these
fundamentals seem deceptively simple: "I didn't go any further than fifth grade in school myself. But with my good sense and mother-wit, and knowing how to treat and respect the feelings of other people, that's all I've needed through life."
Armstrong's "good sense and mother-wit" covered a lot of ground. He also had, in abundance, what used to be called character--a currently unfashionable concept, since we are all supposed to be molded by environment. Of course, New Orleans was and is a very special place, and at that time it had a unique musical culture-in-the-making, something that gave young Louis inspiration. But even early on, his love of music and of life was combined with an extraordinary sense of
responsibility, toward himself and what he very soon conceived of as his work. We speak of "playing" music, and young Louis certainly found exhilaration in playing his horn. But he also quickly noticed that musicians who didn't watch their intake of alcohol or take care of their health in other ways were less likely to play consistently well.
Armstrong was never a puritan, but he was a firm believer, early and late in life, in the separation between work and play. Thus he never table-hopped between sets, always warmed up before taking the stand, and reserved his pleasurable indulgences for after working hours. But, as we learn from his autobiography, he certainly did not practice deprivation of the senses. He writes of a musician on board
the Mississippi riverboat that carried the band, led by Fate Marable,
in which the young cornetist honed his playing and reading skills.
This man nearly starved himself in order to invest all his earnings
in cotton farming, but the boll weevils devoured his cotton and he
became near-suicidal. "I'll never be rich," Armstrong concluded from
observing this, "but I'll be a fat man." He did become rich, however
(and sometimes fat as well), but never spent much on himself. His
wives were well provided for, but he had no need for "a flock of
suits," and perhaps because he never forgot the generous tips his
early playing had inspired from his audience of whores, pimps,
toughs, and hustlers, he gave away what he could afford as long as he
lived, without the slightest ostentation.
Sharp powers of observation also led Armstrong to let others handle
the business side of bandleading, including hiring and firing. This
decision was often misunderstood, but he explains it perfectly well
in Satchmo: "I never cared to become a bandleader; there was too much
quarreling over petty money matters. I just wanted to play my horn as
I am doing now [1954]. I have always noticed that the bandleader not
only had to satisfy the crowd but that he also had to worry about the
box office." Of course Armstrong did not leave all bandleading
decisions, especially hiring, to his musical directors or managers;
he simply did not want to take energy away from his playing in order
to deal with the everyday banalities of music as a business. Making
the music was a full-time job; he let others count the house.
Throughout his long career, Armstrong looked back on his New Orleans apprentice years with the greatest warmth and respect for his peers. First, of course, came King Oliver, who had treated him somewhat like a son, given him pointers, and groomed him to take his job with trombonist Kid Ory's band when Oliver left in 1919 for Chicago. Then came such other influential cornetists as Buddy Petit, Bunk Johnson, and Freddie Keppard, and a host of other musicians: clarinetists, drummers, bass players, guitarists. And most of all, there were the brass bands with which Armstrong loved to march, and to the strains of which he had "second-lined" (danced in the streets) as a child.
It was in New Orleans, too, that he'd heard the strains of European music, not only the marches, quadrilles, and waltzes so inventively transformed by the early jazz players, but also the operatic arias popular in the city that took such pride in its French Opera--the center of New Orleans social and cultural life. Operatic themes were also prominent on the programs of the concert bands that played on Sundays in the park band shells and featured cornetists as their star soloists, and on a lesser scale, these themes were also ground out on barrel organs.
And there was yet another, strictly modern, influence: the phonograph. Armstrong first acquired one after his marriage (at seventeen) to Daisy Parker, whom he'd first met when he was her customer. (The marriage didn't last long, for reasons well described in Satchmo.) In 1966 he recalled those early records: "Most of my records were the Original Dixieland Jazz Band--Larry Shields and his bunch. They were the first to record the music I played. I had Caruso records too, and Henry Burr, Galli-Curci, Tetrazini--they were all my favorites. Then there was the Irish tenor, McCormack--beautiful phrasing."
Many ingredients went into the making of Armstrong's musical mind. Early writers on jazz emphasized ragtime, spirituals, blues, marches, and dance music; few, if any, mentioned opera. More recently musicologists have been taking some notice of the parallels between Armstrong's formal solo structure (including such elements as opening and closing cadenzas) and operatic arias. As we shall see, Armstrong not only listened to such material, he later played it as well.
When he joined the Fate Marable orchestra aboard the steamer St. Paul, which cruised up the Mississippi as far as Davenport (where a young man with a horn, Bix Beiderbecke, first encountered Armstrong), the repertory included the latest popular hits. These were learned from sheet music, and Armstrong's reading knowledge was rudimentary. Marable thought so well of his playing that he hired the young man
nonetheless, with the understanding that he would apply himself diligently. David Jones, who played saxophone and tenor horn in the band, took Little Louis under his wing and taught him to read (and write) music; the pupil caught on quickly. Also in the band were such stellar players as the brothers Dodds, clarinetist Johnny and drummer Baby; the bassist Pops Foster; and the guitarist Johnny St. Cyr, all of whom would become Armstrong associates in the next decade.
About this time Armstrong also showed his first gifts as a songwriter. He whipped up a little number called "Get Off Katie's Head," and sol...
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Finally, a collection by one of our most respected critics
By Jeff Lowenthal
I have been waiting a long time for this book, speaking as someone who has often bought reissues of records I already owned, just to have Dan's liner notes.
From his days at Down Beat to the present, he has maintained the highest standards of critical integrity, tempered with kindness. Unlike many "critics" he is not a slash and burn operator, seeking to trash some performers to enhance the reputation of others, or praising one school of jazz to denigrate another.
He has his favorites, of course. The book is heavily weighted toward more mainstream performers, which is fine with me.
In particular, his appreciation and love for Louis Armstrong comes through in the 81 pages devoted to his live performances and recordings, as well as critical reviews of two biographies. There are insights into his true character, some of which will be surprising to readers who know only his show business face.
Jumping forward a few generations, he says this in a 1958 review of Ornette Coleman "...whatever may happen, this music is not the jazz of the future but a sincere and somewhat raw attempt to chart new tributaries." Do you see what I mean about "kindness?"
So, from Bessie Smith and Louis to Ornette and Bill Evans, there is a lot to savor in this collection, one any jazz fan will enjoy.
Otherwise, 5 stars. Bravo to Morgenstern and his editor, Sheldon Meyer.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
King of Jazz Criticism
By Charlie
What I love about Morgenstern is that not only is he the greatest critic since John Hammond, but he never interjects himself or his emotion into his writing. While sometimes dry, this is the greatest collection of essays, reviews, liner notes, etc. A must for any fan of jazz or jazz scholor.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting reference
By James
Someone please tell me why Morgenstern, in the Table of Contents and within the section on "Liner Notes", does not provide album titles. This also happens occasionally throughout other parts of this tome. It is very irritating and for this reason I give "Living with Jazz" four stars instead of five. Otherwise, a very exhaustive and interesting reference.
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