Players - Downbeat

BOOKS
by Matthew Lurie
Musicians’ Record Collections
Key to Personalities
Great musicians don’t always make for great straightahead interview
subjects, but there are other ways to describe these artists.
Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for The New York Times, has cultivated a
unique device: Put on a few of a jazz musician’s favorite records
and let the conversation flow.
The Jazz Ear (Times Books) collects 15 of Ratliff’s riotously
good “Listening With” pieces, all of which originally appeared in
the Times, with Sonny Rollins, Andrew Hill, Pat Metheny and Paul
Motian as some of the standout subjects. As Ratliff acknowledges
in the introduction, precedent for these pieces lays mostly with
DownBeat’s “Blindfold Test.” But in letting each artist select his or
her own albums, and by allowing the conversations to wander all
over the psycho-musical map, Ratliff ends up with portraits that
tell as much about these legendary
musicians’ musical
ideas as they do of who they
are as human beings.
The musicians’ choices are
often as surprising as they are
revealing. Motian puts on a
Baby Dodds “documentary”
record to illustrate the importance
a drummer plays in delineating
song structure. Ornette
Coleman says he uses a 1916
recording by Jewish cantor
Josef Rosenblatt to describe
how there can be “crying,
singing and praying, all in the
same breath.” Dianne Reeves
finds lessons in a song by country
singer-songwriter Mary Chapin
Carpenter on the gradual crumbling of an aged romance.
Ratliff relates these exchanges with a profoundly elegant style,
suffusing his loaded imagery with pregnant pauses—not unlike a
literary Ahmad Jamal. Hill’s enigmatic oeuvre needs only a few
lines for readers to get the picture: “His work is dense and knotty
and difficult to play, but much of it is beautiful, aerated with song.
There’s an undefined, shifting-sands feeling.”
But the real meat of The Jazz Ear comes outside of his ruminations
on music. Ratliff digresses into his subject’s body language
(Maria Schneider dancing out her own melodies), dress (when
Wayne Shorter, clad in a Superman T-shirt, puts on Vaughan
Williams, Ratliff points out Shorter’s not-so-subtle fondness for
“superhero music”) and especially conversational style. There’s
Joshua Redman’s surprising insecurity: “Redman is an on-theone-hand,
on-the-other kind of talker and by extension tacks naturally
toward self-effacing comments, often to the effect that he
hasn’t heard enough, or that he can never reach the level of
understanding or sheer musicianship of someone else.”
When Coleman takes a defensive tack, Ratliff seizes the
moment instead of ignoring it: “This is the sound of Coleman’s
gate closing. He loves exposing you to this cast of mind, but if he
senses you trying to pick it apart or superimposing a grid of
Western logic on it, he holds you at bay with a charming tautology.”
An incidental moment for the average interviewer becomes
a revealing one for Ratliff. DB
Ordering info: henryholt.com
April 2009 DOWNBEAT 77