Jazz: A History of America's Music by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Jazz: A History of America's Music
Book Review: An excellent overview.....
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this was a terrific overview that captures the spirit and beauty of the music. It gave wondeful insight and depth to the people behind the music...innovators such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. I think some people will be disappointed in the book simply because it does not adhere to their particular viewpoint (there is very little coverage of fusion....no great loss in my book). But for people who want to get the background of the music and peer into the origins of it, who want to understand the passion that lies within it, this is a must read.Book Review: Nothing new here
Summary: 3 Stars
I didn't care for the book. Sure it's pretty and will get some folks interested in the music, but I found the treatment a bit heavy-handed. Talking about musicians as bold innovators and soul stylists and technical wizards is all a bit much for me. Many of the greatest jazz musicians were addicts and just generally not very nice people. Also, I really didn't see anything in that book that I haven't seen in other books. It almost looks as though Burns took a "best of" approach to a lot of other jazz history books out there. Personally, I've had enough of the who, what, when, and where that you can read any old dusty history book. What I want is the how and why and this book certainly doesn't answer either question. One last note: any jazz history book that talks about Wynton Marsalis more often than it mentions J.J. Johnson is not a book I'm going to spend money on.Book Review: The rise and perceived fall of jazz!
Summary: 3 Stars
I agree with the previous reviewer that this book has the look...but not the feel, particularly for jazz's most recent half-century. What is so difficult to understand? What happened with--not to--jazz in recent decades is merely that most of its genuine creative spirits believed that it should reflect its era of creation. Not to run and hide from it, or adhere to an orthodox, rear-view mirror definition. Ironically Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other celebrated early greats are celebrated for breaking/remaking the pop culture paradigms of their day. Miles Davis does the same thing in a later era and he gets accused by a vocal minority--given much word-time in this book--of something akin to treason. If in recent decades a particular "jazz" musician heard a connection with an avant-garde sensibility, then the better visionaries (Ornette, Coltrane) effectively bridged that gap. If one sensed a connection with other countries (Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, etc.), then some intuitive artists made THAT work (Stan Getz, Toshiko Akiyoshi, etc.). And if one had an affinity for the more creative efforts in contemporary popular culture, then you got a best-of-many-worlds hybrid, at least from such forward-thinkers as Davis, Cassandra Wilson, Monday Michiru (who is virtually unknown in the land that created jazz--FYI Toshiko is her mom), and others. Concurrently, some musicians seemed to react against this no-holds-barred eclecticism and pick up from points in the now-distant past. That's okay, too...but it's not the only "right" way to bridge jazz's past with it's present and future.
Of course, a majority of tag-along musicians dumbed-down all of these valid scenarios, with results that ranged from commercial-lite to cacaphonic-heavy. Yet particularly the former was true in jazz's early decades, too. Bottom line: the best recent efforts are no less aesthetically timeless than the indisputable great moments of jazz's first half-century.
Sorry to rant, but I think my opinions are far from unique among contemporary jazz fans...in fact, there was already a long line forming before I got in it. I would lukewarmly recommend this book to newcomers, because despite its faults it does attempt to deal with this unique art form in a serious manner, and with a stylish, photo-rich layout. I would just add that a lot of us fans would like to have seen our vision of contemporary jazz better-reflected, rather than not-too-subtly dissed. For one, the Grammy awards been there, done that.
Book Review: Jazz Did Not End in 1955!
Summary: 3 Stars
Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns have produced another handsome book, featuring the same opulent look and feel as their earlier, best selling books on The Civil War and Baseball. Their writing on jazz's early history is outstanding. Burns & Co. have also done a magnificent job of culling the nation's photo archives for rare photos of jazz's most famous founding fathers along with many of its long since forgotten contributors. For me, this alone is worth the price of admission. The big problem with this book is that it provides, at best, a severely truncated and tendentious history of the music. The (generally crisp) narrative simply peters out about 1955. One chapter gives a cursory overview of several developments in the 1950s. The final chapter covers the remaining 40 years in a slim, almost perfunctory twenty or thirty pages. Perhaps the book should have been titled "Jazz: The First 50 Years."
It appears to me that the authors - both autodidacts in the field of jazz - simply lost their nerve. Writing a jazz history in the years after 1950 admittedly gets harder. The music splits into many competing schools and styles. Much of it is simply harder for the uninitiated to listen to. But this is no excuse to gloss over or ignore the great music and musicians who mean so much to jazz fans born after 1940. (Would you believe that Charles Mingus only merits a piddling sidebar?)
The authors seem to have signed onto the orthodoxy of Wynton Marsalis and his ilk. In a nutshell, this holds that jazz took (multiple) wrong turns in the modern era. It stopped featuring the familiar, danceable, toe-tappable shuffling swing that earned it its original popularity. In other words, modern jazz has turned into a musical dead end. The only hope for its salvation is to return to the earlier swing and bop forms and overlay them with a slightly more complex and refined sensibility. It is not hard to discern within the narrative the heavy hand of critics who comprise this school of thought: Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton himself.
In sum, by embracing a cramped, severely circumscribed definition of jazz, the authors utterly fail to understand (much less elucidate) the modern era in jazz. Free jazz was/is more than just angry black nationalist ranting. Fusion, at its best, was not simply a sell-out to triumphalist rock. (And, no, Miles Davis did not "denature" the music when he plugged in.)
For me, the elegiac tone of this book is both insulting and patronizing. Baseball did not begin to die when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Neither did jazz when Ornette Coleman whipped out his alto sax in New York City in 1959.
By all means, do buy this beautiful book. Just be aware of the stultifying orthodoxy emanating from each of its glossy pages.