The Jazz Review - Jazz Studies Online

with anything better. The result is
a stylistic vacuum, in which Madison
Avenue jargon ("lusty satire showcasing
Green's incomparable dirty
tone") jostles the newspaperman's
adjective-hunting, which seems so
often a sort of condescension ("a
dozen sides which remain among the
most exhilarating small group work
on disks"). The jazzmakers themselves
are treated with a standard
brand of tight-lipped sentimentality.
But of course it is difficult to avoid
the Ernest tone, even if it estranges
the subject instead of bringing it
closer.
Along with what is weak or irritating,
the book offers much that
is good, especially when the musicians
speak for themselves. Baby
Dodds and Roy Eldridge sound off
at length. Hentoff shepherds critics,
promoters, musicians, and Lester
Young through a most illuminating
panel discussion of Lester Young.
Charles Edward Smith contributes
articles on Pee Wee Russell, Teagarden,
and Billie. These pieces are
true evocations of personality: every
rambling paragraph, moreover, exhibits
the respect and affection of
Smith for what he is dealing with.
And isn't this first requisite of
readable criticism?
The Jazz Makers was published last
year by Rinehart and now reappears
(with some different photographs)
as a reprint from the Grove
Press, which already offers Hodeir's
valuable and annoying book. It is
encouraging to find a line of paper
backs hospitable to books on jazz,
but sad to acknowledge that so few
merit reprinting.
—Glenn Coulter
J A M SESSION, edited by Ralph J.
Gleason, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958
Under the accurately loose-sounding
title, Jam Session and subtitle
"An Anthology of Jazz," jazz writer,
reviewer, critic and fas I'm sure he'd
insist on including) still-enthusiastic
veteran jazz fan Ralth Gleason has
compiled an extremely varied thirtysix
piece collection concerned with as¬
pects or people of jazz. All but one
are non-fiction—the exception is
Elliott Grennard's highly effective
"Sparrow's Last Jump," which deals
with a musician who flips, quite literals,
at a recording session, a story
that has been described as an almostnon-fictional
account of a Charlie
Parker session. Like almost any
other anthology in the world, this
volume is clearly designed to be read
in fairly small chunks, or left on the
bedside table. Much of it appears to
have been originally written for light
reading—brief personality sketches,
musicians' reminiscences — although
there are several efforts at serious
critical or analytical writing. On this
level—which is a completely respectable,
and in this case quite enjoyable
level—this is generally a very
successful collection.
If the foregoing seems a somewhat
negative way of speaking well of a
book, it is just because I feel there is
some need to keep the reader from
being deceived by the books' own
presentation of itself. For we have
here another instance of the great
war between publishers and writers
(or anthologists), the manifestation
of which is in the jacket blurb claiming
far more that the man who put
the book together thought of doing,
and the main potential victim of
which is the purchaser of the book.
Mr. Gleason, who is literate and nonpretentious,
notes in his introduction
that he could not make this a winnowing
of the best jazz pieces he has
read in the past twenty years, largely
because so much that seemed good at
the time has turned out on re-inspection
to have grown dated or
corny. So all he claims for the hook
is that it is "an interesting collection
of articles about interesting people,
interesting aspects of jazz and ex¬
planations of it." He notes with re¬
gret that there are no articles about
Duke, Louis, or Bird, but points out
that the book couldn't hope to be allinclusive.
When he takes such an ap¬
proach, it would be unfair to fault
him very much for not including the
work of a single current serious jazz
writer (excepting only himself, and
none of Ralph's several pieces here
are intended as 'serious' writing),
and I would even be inclined to let
him get away with limiting a selection
entitled "The Coming of Modern
Jazz" to only three selections (one
of which is from The Partisan Review—and
reads that way; and another
by the splenetically argumentative
and inadequatelv informed
Henry Pleasants). But why, oh why,
does the jacket blurb have to insist
that within these pages is ". . . the
finest writing on jazz that has appeared
during the past two decades
... in pieces by and about the jazz
world's greatest critics, performers
and writers"? Why are we informed
that this anthology seeks "to bring
into perspective the whole body of
... a new and serious writing" about
jazz? It's not really Cleason's fault,
but too much caveat emptor is too
much.
This gripe aside, the book has lots
of good fun in it, as previously indicated.
There are some examples of
the rich, ripe Boston prose of George
Erazier; there is that Grennard story
(which I had never read before and
was grateful for) ; there is an old
and interesting Bruce Lippincott
piece that is sort of a theoretical dissection
of the jam session; there are
excerpts from the spoken recordings
of Jelly Roll Morton and Bunk Johnson;
two good items by the late Otis
Ferguson (one of the under-appreciated
early jazz writers); an intriguing
fragment about prohibition
Chicago by Art Hodes, who was
there; Lillian Ross' classic (if you
know how seriously not to take it)
New Yorker yarn on the first clambake
at Newport. There are also lesser
items by less able or interesting
people; and there is a mite too much
of the editor himself (eight selections,
some quite good, but about
three that don't seem worth it: one
on the up-coming of "Rhythm and
Blues" that is rather dated; a 1946
piece on the career of Nat "King"
Cole; and a 1956 detailing of how
active things were in jazz on the
West Coast).
All in all, a good though certainly
not indispensable book, and at its
fully comparable price ($4.95,) a
hetter buy than a lot of twelve-inch
LPs that are issued nowadays. But
if you take this book home, don't forget
to throw away the wrapper before
anyone can get at it.
—Orrln Keepnews
T H E HANDBOOK OF JAZZ, bv Barry
Ulanov. Viking Press, 1957
Somewhere in the vast United
States, it seems there is an institution
called Barnard College, and in this
college there dwells an assistant professor
of the English language called
Barry Ulanov. I state these facts as
categorically as possible because people
who read Ulanov's Handbook will
think there has been some mistake.
The Handbook is a pedestrian
hotchpotch of old-hat anecdote and
smug presumption badly written. The
professor says "flatted" when he
means "flattened" and still believes
after all those years at college that
the flute is a reed instrument. He is
also a past master of the construction
of those wooly sentences which, like
the lights of 'Broadway, look pretty
so long as you don't attempt to read
them.
Early in the book, the professor
tells us that Lester Young's style is
"close-noted." whatever that is supposed
to mean. And then we learn,
later on, that Lester's style features
the use of "sustained open notes"—a
trulv professional example of nonsense
contradicting itself. After this
kind of stuff, the reader is hardly