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Jazz dialogue: gary giddins in conversation with loren schoenberg (part two)

Gary Giddins: I guess that the first writer who really got me excited was a critic named Dwight Macdonald. He was sort of a lefty political writer, but when I was a kid he had started writing about movies for Esquire. When I was maybe 12 or something, my father used to subscribe to Esquire, which in those days had a reputation for being racy — all I knew was he hid them behind his hat boxes. I think it was the girlie drawings by Varga. One night he and my mother were out and I pulled down some magazines and the first one had a letter complaining about Macdonald’s review of Ben Hur, which I had seen a year or so before. This woman was fulminating, which made me want to read Macdonald’s review and it is hilarious. I use it as a reading in my class at the CUNY Graduate Center. I loved his independence and wit, his refusal to accept received wisdom and I read everything of his I could fine.

The next guy who did it for me was Edmund Wilson, especially Classics and Commercials and The Shores of Light. They’ve just come out in a Library of America edition, and stand up beautifully. By then I was 15, and I was determined to write — I never considered anything else.

Jason Moran told me a few weeks ago that his parents had him taking classical music lessons. He hated it. He hated practicing. He had no interest in being a musician. He obviously had this incredible facility, but he just didn’t grab them. Then one day, a relative died and at the memorial service they put on Monk’s “Round Midnight.” He was 12 and that was it. The other shoe dropped. For me, it was — before I became enamored of criticism — biographies and fiction. House of the Seven Gables was a revelation. I read everything, lived in the library, bought paperback books whenever I had change in my pocket.

After Macdonald and Wilson, there were many other critics I loved, including Max Beerbohm, and Shaw as a music critic and then, when I started reading about jazz, Martin Williams and Dan Morgenstern made me realize that jazz criticism could be an exciting literary pursuit.

Loren Schoenberg: To go back to my very first question when I was asking you to put something in five-year old terms, I’ll take the five-year old thing off the table, but I’ll ask you in the simplest terms, how can we understand what is a critic? What’s the role of a critic?

Gary Giddins: A critic is a kind of diplomat, a liaison between the artist and the public. The critic doesn’t work for the artists, who frequently have a hard time understanding that. It used to drive me crazy when musicians would thank me for “giving them ink.” I wanted to say my job is not to give you ink.

You’re working for the art in a sense, especially if you’re a jazz critic ‘cause you want to promote interest in the art. You want to tell people what they should be listening to. But you’re really writing for the public. You’re writing for yourself. I did a book called Weather Bird, and in the introduction explained that, at some point at the Voice I realized it didn’t make sense for me to write 1,800 words telling you not to buy a record that you were never going to buy in the first place, that you’ve never even heard of. In movie reviewing, you have to cover whatever opens. But with jazz there are so many clubs, so many new records, so many reissues — why should I waste the space for bad stuff when there is so much good stuff I want to tell people about.

The wonderful thing about writing about jazz is that you have so many options. You feel like writing about swing? Go to the place where Loren is playing. You feel like writing about avant garde, go to the place where Ornette is playing. You always have these options, and that’s what’s exciting about jazz — the changing history, the variety, the different ways of playing. It breaks my heart when I meet young critics who think jazz was invented in 1959 by Miles Davis. It’s not a job to find out who Duke Ellington was and if you don’t, then you’re writing from a position of ignorance that would never be accepted of a classical music or literary critic.

Loren Schoenberg: Absolutely. Yes, sir.

Audience member: How will you explain the fact that jazz has been such a place of conflict?

Gary Giddins: I’m sorry. Jazz?

Audience member: Has been such a place of conflict among critics.

Gary Giddins: Why do critics argue about it?

Audience member: Yes.

Gary Giddins: Well, for one thing it’s human nature for people to get very involved with the music that initially excited them. For people who grew up in the swing era, they had Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Benny Goodman, I mean it was the circus every day. When bebop came along they didn’t trust it, didn’t get it. So instead of saying, “I’ll write about Benny Goodman and leave Charlie Parker to you,” they started attacking it. It was unbelievable, some of the things that were written.

But then what really was interesting was that the bebop critics who wrote beautifully about Bird and Dizzy and Bud Powell, when they heard the new music of the 50s, the avant garde, they had the same exact response as the moldy figs and started attacking that. I realize now that I responded with knee-jerk disdain to the fusion period. Now I don’t know why I was so upset. It was basically plugged in bop to some degree, with a back beat. But at the time I just wasn’t hearing it and I shouldn’t have written about it until I was.

That’s the other thing. You can’t write a negative review that has any value unless you’ve spent as much time understanding the work as you would a work that you love. You have to spend as much time with it and figure out why it doesn’t work.

It’s interesting. As a jazz critic when I go to a concert I trust myself. I always feel like I’m right on it, and rarely second-guess myself. I know a good solo from a mediocre one. And yet I never give myself that credit when I review a record. I’ve got to play the record a dozen times before I’m certain. I don’t know why that is, but it’s just always the way I’ve worked.

Loren Schoenberg: Interesting. You used the word record, which I use, too, which is a dating thing these days. If you say to somebody who’s under 30, if you say where’s the record store they just look at you like, ah ha ha ha.

Gary Giddins: Yeah; but where is the record store. That’s another loss — talk about marketing.

Loren Schoenberg: It’s on the Internet.

Gary Giddins: That’s another problem. You can buy a record on the Internet and save money, but all of us who remember the record stores remember shopping and all the records we bought that we didn’t go in for, but that we just happened to see when going through the racks.

Loren Schoenberg: Right. And also for me and probably for others, it was at the record bin at the Sam Goody’s near my hometown where I met jazz nuts.

Gary Giddins: Yeah; me, too.

Loren Schoenberg: And met the jazz people and talked about this and traded things and did you know this album. That’s totally lacking. I mean I guess the best analogy is kids who look up words on the Internet for a definition as opposed to paging through a dictionary — and the fact that paging through a dictionary; you’re going to wind up seeing all these other words.

We have in the audience this evening the author of the recent biography of Frankie Manning and that’s Cynthia Norman here, who’s a dancer herself.

I’d like to ask Gary about dancing and jazz because you were lamenting before about the lack of jazz as a functional kind of music. In other words, something that people either screw up their intellect or thing that they have to know something about and they just don’t – you could dance to Cecil Taylor. You could dance to John Coltrane. You could dance to Bill Evans. You could dance to any of it. It’s music with a beat and we’ve gotten to this strange . . .

Gary Giddins: Cecil dances. He often begins his concerts by dancing.

Loren Schoenberg: But we’ve gotten to this strange point now where jazz bands are trying to swing, in their own way — no matter how they subjectively define swing — trying to make it rhythmically interactive; and consequently we have an audience that’s strapped in their chairs and the one thing they’re not supposed to do is move.

If they move they get this kind of psycho-drama thing that comes from middle class Germany in the 19th Century about people going to hear music as though they’re going to church because they think that that’s how the aristocrats listen to it, which isn’t how the aristocrats listen to it. And we still have it today when you go to classical concerts and you see the people sitting like that. They don’t even know why they’re sitting like that. I mean I really would love to stand up at one of those concerts.

I’d probably get fired from my gig at Juilliard if I did, but just stand up in the middle of a symphony concert and say [Speaking loudly]: ‘Excuse me, why are we all sitting like this.’ And the thing is is that they can’t even answer the question because they don’t know.

Now my question is what do you think?

Gary Giddins: About that?

Loren Schoenberg: Yeah.

Gary Giddins: I think that first of all there’s an issue of etiquette that you’re bringing up because you should be relaxed in a club. You should have a drink. You should be tapping your foot. You should be responding in any way you want to respond. If you hear something great you should yell out, cheer, get involved . . .

Loren Schoenberg: Right; but you shouldn’t clap after every solo?

Gary Giddins: I was just going to say, we are a society that tips everyone. Even if the service was awful, we leave a tip. That’s what happens now in jazz clubs. We applaud every solo no matter how indifferent. You may not even be listening, but somebody else started the applause so you add to it.

Applause in the middle of a performance is supposed to be an acknowledgment that somebody just played something that really got you going. But then there’s another kind of thing that people do that most musicians hate — clapping in time, unless the bandleader encourages it. Sarah Vaughn told me once, “Every time they do that to me, I just change the beat until they realize they’re not clapping on the right beat anymore.”

Herbie Mann, when he made that famous record of “Coming Home Baby” at Newport said that he had to keep walking backwards to the bass because he couldn’t hear it over the clapping in time.

Loren Schoenberg: So, do you think that in terms of the future of jazz, I know once we start talking about the future of jazz it’s time to haul out the Ouija board, but can you foresee a time when dance will come back into it?

Gary Giddins: Well you were part of that little moment, retro swing. I think that things get recycled. There’ll be fads. But one thing about jazz is that no one in the entire history of it has ever predicted what was going to happen.

Nobody during the swing era could have imagined Charlie Parker. Nobody in Charlie Parker’s era could have imagined Ornette Coleman. Coltrane in 1956 could not have imagined Coltrane in 1961. Nobody would have predicted how many homages we’re hearing today.

Loren Schoenberg: Oh, isn’t that horrible?

Gary Giddins: It’s really getting to be a drag.

Loren Schoenberg: It’s killing jazz music. They call it an homage because these jazz clubs now instead of booking so and so, they book the Dizzy Gillespie tribute or the Count Basie orchestra. When the Count Basie orchestra plays, I bet you that there’s 27 percent of the people in that audience who think that Count Basie is up there. I’m serious. They don’t know.

Gary Giddins: You know Daryl Sherman. She's a very talented pianist/singer. She plays at the Waldorf and she always announces that she’s playing Cole Porter’s piano. She says every week at least one person says, “Will Mr. Porter be performing this week?”

Loren Schoenberg: Yeah; so it’s a funny anecdote, but what it speaks to is the fact that the jazz business in a sense is being killed by this thing. But on the other hand, let me make a devil’s advocate kind of argument . . . Louis Armstrong is this over-powering figure and all these people and it came out of something that was directly related to 19th Century America and early 20th Century America, the great migration and the social values at those times and all these . . .

Gary Giddins: And the dancing and the nightclubs and people getting together . . .

Loren Schoenberg: Just the whole thing. That’s gone. That happened. It was a wonderful moment and some great music came out of it, but in a sense what you’re seeing whenever you go to a jazz club or a jazz festival or go to a jazz event, you’re really seeing like the last disciples of Christ or somebody. . . . I think Neil Leonard wrote about it a long time ago, but we do get almost messianic about it, like when we talk about Armstrong and we talk about these epiphanies. Things that just don’t resonate anymore because that time is gone.

Now this is a devil’s advocate argument but I’d just like to hear your — I’d like to hear your response to it.

Gary Giddins: Ornette once said – he started his own record label and he was putting out a record and he said, “This is going to sell a million copies.” I said, “Ornette, how do you figure it’s going to sell a million copies?” He says, Well, there are 400 million people in this country and surely one out of every four hundred or something is going to like this music. He’s absolutely right.

The problem is that 350 million will never even know that it exists. That’s the issue that we’re facing. You can travel around this country and never hear jazz.

Loren Schoenberg: Okay; but to get back to my question.

Gary Giddins: Yeah; but that’s an important issue. No, the question is, I assume, that nobody likes everything and that even if you took the most popular, the greatest Count Basie or Coleman Hawkins record ever made and play it for a group of this size, maybe only two people will come over afterwards and say, “Tell me about that record.”

But you have to have the ability to market it to a large number of people so that the smaller number of people can be turned on to it. That’s what no longer exists. In the 60s there was commercial jazz radio. Not much; maybe a few hours a week, but we all knew where those few hours were.

Loren Schoenberg: Yeah; but we’re still dancing around my question because basically okay, let’s say that you get your druthers and everybody in America hears jazz. Somehow it’s promoted like other niche musics are promoted.

So, it’s promoted; okay, fine and the number goes up this much to two percent of record sales. Now it’s six or seven, which is pretty damn good and more people know about it. But that still doesn’t answer my question — because you talked about Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie. They were born when Orville Wright invented the airplane, okay? 1903-1904. That’s when they’re born. My question, which I want to get you to address is that . . . There’ll always be a little bunch of people like us and like you and like other people around the world who love this music from a certain time and for us it’s a great experience. But in terms of any relevance to the culture at large outside of this hermetically sealed concert experience — it’s gone?

Gary Giddins: It’s been moved outside the mainstream of the culture. . . . Ken Burns got this wrong and we argued about it. He had the whole country dancing to jazz in the ‘30s, and then bop killing it off in 1950s. But jazz was a huge business in the 1950s. It was Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ellington’s biggest hit records . . .

Loren Schoenberg: Sarah Vaughn.

Gary Giddins: And also the LP sold in numbers that the 78s didn’t sell because it was during the Depression and spending a dollar on a piece of vinyl with two tracks was not something everybody could do. When the LP came out, it offered for two and a half dollars 12 tracks or 16 tracks. Those records really sold. Those jazz musicians, a lot of them became celebrities. People knew who Gerry Mulligan was. People know who a lot of musicians were in that period.

Look how many of them were signed up by the major labels. Columbia didn’t recruit Monk out of charity. Thelonious Monk was selling big-time numbers. Mingus was selling big-time numbers. And I think that today, despite all those homages, jazz is really a lot of fun. When I go out, I almost always come back in a good mood. Almost any night you go to the Vanguard or Jazz Standard, there are just so many great players out there. The overall level of musicianship is amazing.

Loren Schoenberg: But how about if part of the experience is turned into some-thing? Not only for you, but maybe for most of us, in which there’s something almost self-validating about the experience and we no longer look to the fact that when Coleman Hawkins and all these people we idolize were out there . . .

Gary Giddins: Let’s only talk about living musicians and see where the conversation goes.

Loren Schoenberg: What I’ll say is those people that we idolize from the early days, one of the things that they were doing was breaking the barriers and playing something new to challenge the listener. Sometime when you go to the Vanguard and the other clubs, you hear inspired, at best, versions of what’s been done.

Gary Giddins: Well, I don’t know. I went to see a band. It was Bill Frisell and Don Byron and Paul Motian and they were doing arrangements of things like Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and it was fantastic. I don’t know how many people knew what the tunes were. I didn’t know a lot of them. I’m sure there was probably something by Joni Mitchell. All I knew is they were really playing.

Loren Schoenberg: But Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and these are things from the 1960s . . .

Gary Giddins: Well, whatever it is, it’s stuff that’s outside the conventional jazz repertoire.

Loren Schoenberg: But what I’m wondering is that has it become for most of us something that is validating, something that we know is going to be, as opposed to something that’s truly challenging.

Gary Giddins: Okay; two fast anecdotes. I was at a festival in Ouro Preto in Brazil in September. Joshua Redman played. His regular drummer couldn’t make it so Greg Hutchinson sat in.

Now Greg Hutchinson, you know him; unbelievable drummer. I think he’s one of the most exciting drummers alive and he goes back with Joshua, long time. They’re old friends, but he hadn’t played with him in – I don’t know – 15 years or something. So this was only the third gig they played together. Hutchinson just decided that he was tired of the arrangement and he was going to shake it up. You could see Joshua responding physically at one point after he played an unbelievable solo. He said to the audience, “I don’t know; maybe it’s the altitude.” But it was really coming from the rhythm section and its willingness and ability to respond to the moment.

Anyway they played an hour that was the best that I ever heard them play. The place went crazy. These were not jazz fans. They were Brazilian music fans. They were people from the town, the college. It’s a tiny little mining village inland; long way from San Paulo or Rio. They just knew that something on that stage was thrilling.

Now the other anecdote is harder to explain in a way, but at Columbia University, David S. Ware’s quartet was on a bill with Cecil and Max — Max Roach and Cecil Taylor played duets, but before that David S. Ware’s quartet came out.

Now this was definitely not a jazz audience. These were thousands of Columbia students and anybody who was in the neighborhood, because it was free and the field was filled. It was like an old rock festival. There were that many people. David Ware killed. The audience was on its feet after every number, cheering.

Now I wonder if 20 of those people went out and bought a Ware album because the guy never sold records in his life. That’s why the group just split up.

Loren Schoenberg: So, is what I’m to take from your response that that experience for those people was not a regurgitation or a validation because they had never had that experience. They viscerally responded to something that they didn’t know.

Gary Giddins: Exactly right, but unlike you or me. The first time I heard a Louis Armstrong record I wanted to hear all of Louis Armstrong, all of Sonny Rollins. The Ware concert was just their adventure for the day. It didn’t make many converts— maybe a few people.

Loren Schoenberg: Okay. Did you have a question, a comment?

Audience member: I wanted to make in response to your question, piggy back on it. Classical music is still selling records from the 13th, 12th Century. Dizzy’s concept was that the new classical music was what they called bebop . . .

Gary Giddins: Yes, but first of all the classical music that is still selling is mostly before the 20th Century for the most part; Stravinsky, the Russian and French modernists and a few others are exceptions. But they’re not selling that much anymore because most people after they buy a couple of sets of Beethoven’s Nine, don’t need every version that comes out.

The problem with jazz is that it covers a lot of history, which can be intimidating and confusing. When we were growing up and I walked into a record store after I heard about Coleman Hawkins, I might buy one of his records, but I was also there to get the new Sonny Rollins or the new Miles Davis.

Now, enough history has passed that when young people who are trying to learn about the music decide they’re going to buy something, are they going to buy Jason Moran or the legendary guy, Monk, they keep hearing about. The fact is that people are buying reissues. That’s what’s keeping the record companies alive.

Loren Schoenberg: I think we’re living in a time of a paradigm shift when it comes to how we view the commercial marketplace, especially how we view record album sales. I mean the whole thing of even buying things and the relationship of being sponsored by a company and advertising for it, I mean that’s a thing of the past frankly. . . .

Gary Giddins: My daughter tells me that nobody buys an album. You go to iTunes and you take the track you want.

Loren Schoenberg: Right.

Gary Giddins: They listen by the track.

Loren Schoenberg: So it’s back to like 78s because that’s what people did with 78s .

Gary Giddins: Exactly right.

Loren Schoenberg: So that whole way of looking at things that we all look at it I think is ultimately a thing of the past.

Gary Giddins: I was just going to say that one of the reasons that people started turning against CDs is because one thing that has not changed in the 200 or so years that music has been an art form in concert halls is that we can only listen so much music before we start to fade out. The time limit is usually 50 to 60 minutes. That’s what a set is. That’s what the longer symphonies are, with few exceptions. The 75 minute CD was not a favor to anybody. People didn’t play them the way they played an LP, listening intently to a 15 minute side. They started to zone out. So you’d listen to a few tracks at a time, but you would never quite get the intimacy with that CD that you got with LPs, let alone 78s.

Loren Schoenberg: Consequently with those days, I guess the people bought the 78s, they got to know every . . .

Gary Giddins: Every note.

Loren Schoenberg: So consequently they became so much more informed about the subtleties and the specificity of that one three-minute record. It’s like you mentioned Benny Goodman. When I worked for Benny Goodman I had a bunch of ratty looking clothes. Benny came up to me and he said, “You know, it’s better to have one good suit than three horrible things like you have right now.” So I went out and I bought one suit. I guess it’s better for the person who wants to get into an art form to really know one thing well and forget all these CDs.

I remember once when I was going to music school, I was going to Manhattan School of Music. There was a young baritone sax player. He was about 19. He really didn’t play that well. I was 20 and I said to him, “Man, you really got to check out some of the swing era players if you want to play this music.” He says, “Man, I’ve done swing. I’m doing bebop this week.”

But anyway the bottom line is somehow I think — I want to go back and ask you one question from the past. This is an area which I’m ignorant and so I don’t know.

So I’m asking for instruction. . . You mentioned Ulysses, Herman Melville, Moby Dick or things like that, pieces of literature that are very sophisticated in a sophisticated dialogue with the past, the present, Shakespeare and all this kind of stuff. Do you think that they thought that you had to have a key to unlock that thing or do you think that you could pick up Ulysses or pick up Moby Dick not knowing any-thing and enjoy the experience?

Gary Giddins: With Ulysses we know that Joyce said that it’ll be years before people have figured out everything in this book. What I discovered about Ulysses after trying to read it many times and getting only part way, is that every time I said I’m going to read it, I would prep myself.

I’d re-read Portrait of the Artist and the Odyssey and I would get all these notes together and what should have been pleasure became an endless homework assignment. One summer Debbie and I went away for a month and I was really in the mood to read Joyce. So I took Ulysses with no notes, no dictionary, nothing and it was one of the greatest month’s reading I’d ever spent, because there’s some stuff you’re not going to get, but the hell with that. You’ll get most of it. You will get 80 percent and it will change your life.

Audience member: Do you think that familiarity is really the key for people understanding jazz? Familiarity with anything will bring understanding, but it wasn’t allowed so we can become familiar with it. That’s my point. I don’t know if you’d like to make some comment about it.

Gary Giddins: You know one of the most successful music events is the Visions Festival downtown, which is all avant garde. That audience has been going there year after year. They know every musician. They love it. It’s very successful.

Loren Schoenberg: Well, you know, we live in a country in which at the Olympics every year they talk to the gold medal. By the time they get to the silver medal winner, that person’s kind of crying. Then the announcer says [in a somber voice], “Now we have the bronze.”

Listen, speaking of third best in the world, we have one of the best in the world writers who has modestly for the last 90 plus minutes just talked about other people and other things. . . . We haven’t even started to talk about your books. I would urge every one of you to go out and read something by Gary Giddins. If you haven’t, read the New York Sun where you’re part of, I think, the best arts, page in town.

Again, thank you so much, Gary. Thank you all for coming.

Gary Giddins: Thanks for having me.

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May 22, 2008 · 2 comments