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- Herausgeber: Edizioni Savine
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION (1957) - Jazz at last has matured to a full-fledged art, not only in this country, hut throughout the world as well. What has been known as an American folk music is now becoming an international form of expression, with artists in all countries constantly exchanging ideas and expanding the limits of their medium. No longer is it possible for the well-informed person, the person interested in the latest developments in the art world, to relegate jazz to the realm of simple, untutored, dance-hall music. Leonard Feather, author of the famous Encyclopedia of Jazz series, has written this hook for the widest possible audience—from the newcomer to the field who asks the basic, most-difficult-to-answer question, “What is jazz?,” to the jazz musician himself (one of whom recently asked, “Who is Bessie Smith?”). Here is a guide to jazz in all its phases: its nature, its sources, instruments, sounds, performers-and the future of jazz.A large part of the book consists of chapters devoted to the story of the role played by each instrument and its major performers. Each history begins with a non-technical discussion of the instrument itself: its function, its range, how it was first used and how it is now used in jazz. It goes on to tell about the artists themselves and how they developed the instrument, their special contribution and their relative importance in the entire world of jazz. From this unique approach emerges a clear and fascinating picture of jazz.The section titled “The Anatomy of Improvisation" presents for the first time actual musical illustrations of the jazz improvisations of 15 of the great soloists from Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman to Art Tatum, Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie. Each solo is studied in detail and with a clarity as enlightening to the listener as to the musician. These solos lead into a unique analysis of the nature of jazz —its harmony, rhythm and structure—and show how it has evolved from the music of the earliest days through ragtime, swing and hop to the latest innovations.In chapters devoted to the origins of jazz, the new evidence is bound to gain the attention of the entire jazz world. Drawing on conversations with musicians from various parts of the country, this section sheds new light on the particular places where jazz was first played. By exploring the sources, it reveals why jazz had its beginnings in the United States and what musical influences and social forces combined to produce this music.In a chapter entitled “Jazz and Bace,” the whole story of racial discrimination in jazz is presented in unprecedented detail. It tells of the early segregation in bands, of the gradual breaking down of the color barriers first by the musicians themselves and then by the public, and of the problems still to be resolved.To this illuminating guide, Leonard Feather brings his many years of experience in the jazz field both as critic and musician. For the person who has long sought a true guide to the enthralling world of jazz; for the student, the fan and the musician to whom jazz is an exciting territory, THE BOOK OF JAZZ provides the much-needed succinct story of this important new art form of the twentieth century.
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THE BOOK OF JAZZ
A GUIDE TO THE ENTIRE FIELD
by Leonard Feather
Foreword by John "Dizzy” Gillespie
New digital edition of:
THE BOOK OF JAZZ - A Guide to the Entire Field
by Leonard Feather
Foreword by John "Dizzy” Gillespie
© 1957 by Horizon Press
Copyright © 2017 - Edizioni Savine
email: [email protected]
web: www.edizionisavine.com
ISBN 978-88-99914-04-2
What experts say about LEONARD FEATHER'S
THE BOOK OF JAZZ
DUKE ELLINGTON says;
“At last—a hook that will interest both the non-expert and those who are already aware...The chapter called The Anatomy of Improvisation’ will command the respect of the classical musician; it shows a highly scientific approach, and clearly the author has the heart for it, as well as the musical equipment. THE BOOK OF JAZZ is a book for people who would become musically mature.”
JOHN "DIZZY" GILLESPIE says:
“In the book of jazz Leonard Feather has a lot of information that has never been put together in this particular (and very useful) way... I think it will be a very valuable addition to our literature on the subject. I hope it can be used as a searchlight along the route...into the future.
JOHN HAMMOND says:
“In the book of jazz Leonard Feather has successfully demolished some myths, and afforded new insights into the origins and future of jazz and its instrumentalists.”
LANGSTON HUGHES says:
“To be so easily readable, Leonard Feather’s the book of jazz
has more musical sense per page and more intellectual meat per paper pound than most factual books on any subject these days. His dramatic and informative chapter on jazz and race is alone worth the price of the book.”
MARSHALL STEARNS says:
“Here’s a wealth of first-hand information, instrument by instrument, enlivened by a new and controversial point of view.”
FOREWORD
BY JOHN "DIZZY” GILLESPIE
Some time ago I pointed out in a magazine article that in spite of all the excitement about jazz and all the things that are happening with it in this country, there are still a lot of developments that have to take place before it will be as big, and mean as much over here as it does in some of the countries overseas where they call it our most important export.
As I said then, it seems to me that a big majority of the American people still think of jazz as music you hear through your feet, not your brains; lowbrow music that’s not good enough to listen to and study and get kicks from, the way the serious fan does abroad.
I can’t remember any experience in America that compares with what happened when my band played in Ankara and Istanbul, when the only way we could stop the show was by playing the Turkish national anthem and closing the curtains when the audience just wouldn’t stop screaming for more. And I will always remember the fantastic scenes in Athens, where some of the students who were supposed to have been involved in anti-American demonstrations gave us the greatest reception of our lives.
I know that Benny Goodman in Thailand, Louis Armstrong in Scandinavia and Ghana, and Norman Granz’ Jazz at the Philharmonic in Europe and Japan have had similar experiences. Even in Iceland and Java and Argentina they have their own publications and jazz clubs. It was in Europe that the first real books on American jazz were published; it was in Europe that the first critics started writing seriously about it 25 years ago when it was almost completely ignored in this country. It is certainly high time for us to build up our own monument to the jazz culture, in the form of a national jazz collection, maybe as part of the Library of Congress, with all the music as well as the books and magazines and records under one roof, and tape-recorded interviews with some of the great pioneers while they are still around to tell their stories. For the same reason, I believe this new book by Leonard Feather is a step in the right direction.
In The Book of Jazz he has a lot of information that has never been put together in this particular (and very useful) way. First there is the part about the backgrounds of jazz, which was always supposed to have originated in the bordellos of New Orleans. Personally, I never did go along with that theory. I figure jazz to be a parallel for what happened in, say, the different cultures of the Caribbean. For example, the musicians in Haiti may play their drums one way, and in Jamaica or Cuba another way, but no matter how different they are, there is a basic root for all their music. Maybe in one place they call it a rhumba, some place else it’s a mambo, and in Trinidad they have the calypso, but essentially it all springs from the same thing.
In the same way all the different forms of jazz grew up separately. It’s a long distance from Trinidad to Cuba, and a long distance from New Orleans to New York, and people didn’t travel much in those days or have the communications we have now, but I’m quite sure that there were the same sort of guys up in the North who had the same influences—African influences—that they had down in the South. I can’t see where it could have all originated in any one city.
This past summer, when I was teaching at the Music Inn School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts, I was talking to Rex Stewart, the cornet player, who gave a lecture up there. It was very enlightening. He said that when Buddy Bolden and those guys were playing in New Orleans there were plenty of musicians up in the North and the East that were wailing them up some, too. This reminds me of when people walk up to me and try to start an argument by telling me, “Say, Dizzy, Charlie Parker said he invented bebop.” And I’ll tell them, “Well, yes, he did; his contribution is what he put into it, but I wouldn’t say that Charlie Parker was the originator of my style, or Monk’s style or Kenny Clarke’s or any of the guys who were supposed to have had anything to do with inventing this music.” In the same way I think Leonard Feather has pointed out some important misunderstandings about the origins of jazz.
I found a whole lot of knowledge, in fact many things I didn’t know, in the instrumental chapters that show the progress and evolutions of the various instruments. I’ve never seen a book on jazz done this way before and it’s a very useful approach to the subject.
As for the chapter on improvisation, I think this is a very, very wonderful idea. I know that when a musician plays a solo he does some things, some effects, that are so personal that if you write them out for someone who has never heard the original, they would have a tough time duplicating it from just looking at the music. If the solo is by some great individual artist like Charlie Parker or Cootie Williams or Johnny Hodges, it would be very difficult to get the same feeling again. However, when you are studying this music without trying to duplicate it, and particularly if you have the record to listen to along with looking at the music, it becomes very fascinating.
It’s pretty strange to look at your own solos. When I looked at the solo from Jessicas Day that’s reproduced in this book, my first reaction was “Wow! Did I play that?” But then I listened to the record and looked at the music again and I found out it was accurate. You can see and hear all the notes, and Leonard Feather explains all about the passing chords and everything, which is very important, because in jazz you are always using these chords to find a new route to travel. It’s like walking into the future. The guy that has the perception to get there more smoothly than another guy, and to reach out in a new direction along this route, is the one who’s creating something.
I have known Leonard Feather since my very, very early history, when I was on 52nd Street with Oscar Pettiford. In fact, it was Oscar who was responsible for bringing him in to hear me at the Onyx Club. He gave us a lot of write-ups in the early days and helped the new movement quite a bit. He was a very early booster of Charlie Parker and, in fact, all the modern cats. He has heard all the musicians and their records all the way back to the early days of Louis Armstrong and the other pioneers, and he knows their stories and their place in the scene. He has done an excellent job in The Book of Jazz, and I think it will be a very valuable addition to our literature on the subject. I hope it can be used as a searchlight along the route for that walk into the future.
NEW YORK, 1957
PART ONE - THE SOURCES
CHAPTER 1 - PERSPECTIVES AND OBJECTIVES
“All music’s gotta be ‘folk’ music: I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.” — Louis Armstrong
With the belated emergence of jazz from its long-suffered role as the Cinderella of esthetics, and with its gradual acceptance in many previously closed areas, the definition of its nature, always disputed among critics and to some extent among musicians and the public, has become a near-impossibility.
Until recently, most of the literature on the subject approached it from an academic viewpoint, usually that of a well-meaning, factually informed historian with no inside knowledge of jazz. A seemingly inevitable corollary was the insistence on recognizing jazz only as a folk art, one in which almost all the practitioners played in sporting houses—simple, unlettered folk whose great spirit lifted their work out of the constrictions of squalid surroundings.
A more realistic view of jazz shows that the conceptions of its early creators were hampered more often than helped by such material factors as the lack of social acceptance and musical knowledge as well as the lack of good instruments and intonation; and that as far back as the early 1920s such pioneers as Ellington and Henderson were becoming aware of the value of musically educated control over natural artistry. If the definition of jazz as folk music held true for almost 100% of what was played before their time, it described perhaps 25 to 50% of what was played up to 1940. It applies to barely 10% of what is being performed and generally accepted as jazz today.
To some this may mean that the incidence of valid, authentic jazz has diminished in direct proportion. Among the vast majority of professional musicians, however, the consensus is that while jazz of the folk or semi-folk variety has its place on the contemporary scene and will endure, the tremendous strides in harmony, melody and rhythm—and the increasing indications of a wedding, or at least a flirtation, with modern classical music— mark a logical and desirable outcome of the jazzman’s attempt to achieve musical maturity.
These developments have been anathema to many writers who have made a lifelong study of their early heroes and condemned as charlatans those who attempt to rescue jazz from the musical strait-jacket to which it was confined in the early stages. One writer, denouncing the swing music of the mid-1930s as a bastardization of jazz, and summing up the genius of Charlie Parker and his colleagues with the conclusion that bop “appeals only to the analytical musical mind and evokes about the same amount of emotional pleasure as a Euclid theorem,” described himself “as a purist and proud of it” and announced that jazz would remain jazz only if it remained “steeped in the virile tradition of New Orleans.” In effect he was speaking for dozens of self-styled “purist” critics who have been trying to place roadblocks in the path of jazz evolution.
Most of the leading jazzmen today are products of a new tradition of musical literacy and restless ambition. But to the traditionalists, from the moment it began to strain at its folk roots, jazz was no longer entirely jazz. When it could no longer be restrained, they announced that it was now a different animal: one French critic has gone to ludicrous lengths in an attempt to prove that bop is not jazz. The more time goes by and young musicians dominate the scene with naturally more advanced ideas, the less traditional or “New Orleans revival” music there will be for the traditionalists to cling to; they will be forced gradually to the conclusion that jazz as they understand the term is dead.
The realists, on the other hand, are faced with a converse problem. So much music in the name of jazz is being performed today that one wonders where a line may be drawn, or whether the use of the term jazz is advisable at all. Is the music of Machito, or Perez Prado, or Cal Tjader’s Afro-Cubans jazz? Is the latest LP by a singer of popular tunes who has been hailed in Down Beat as a “a promising new jazz voice” really jazz, or just an empty echo along Tin Pan Alley? Are the atonal, sometimes out-of-tempo explorations of such avant-gardists as Charles Mingus, Teddy Charles and Teo Macero jazz, wholly or partially or not at all? Are those critics right who claim that improvisation is all, that “written jazz” is a contradiction in terms?
My own feeling is that the jazz label is applied too frequently nowadays to experiments that have little or nothing in common with the essential nature of jazz; that most of the “new jazz voices” are minor talents whose work should not be so classified; that Frank Sinatra, though certainly the jazzmen’s favorite singer, is not a jazz artist; and that the modernists are as guilty of over-indulgence in their broad use of the word jazz as are the traditionalists in the restrictions they place on it.
For the purpose of this book, it is my intention to place a liberal construction upon the term. Anything that has been accorded a wide degree of acceptance among musicians as jazz will be dealt with—whether it be the blues-shouting of a favorite rock-and-roll singer or the filigree arrangements of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It does not seem to me to be the main function of a critic to determine what is not jazz.
The attempts to define jazz have frequently reached an ignotum per ignotius dead end. The task of imbuing in the layman, with expositive words, a sensitive understanding of the dry, ascetic beauty of a Miles Davis improvisation is as hazardous an undertaking as an effort to explain English grammatical construction by playing a trumpet solo. Many have tried to explain jazz in words; all have failed. But the more persuasive writers and lecturers, impressing their audiences with the subject’s validity as material for serious discussion, have drawn into the orbit of jazz appreciation a number of potential converts, willing to listen with a broader mind, a more receptive ear.
The artist complains that the role of the critic is parasitic; pragmatically he observes that criticism is often hopelessly ineffective. Art Tatum and Bud Powell are the preferred pianists of most jazz critics. In polls conducted among critics and musicians, they surpassed all other contenders; scarcely any votes were registered for Dave Brubeck, who has been criticized almost continually by most jazz writers. Yet while Brubeck has won a long series of ballots conducted among the readers of music magazines, the combined influence of the critics could not bring the prestige of such recognition to Tatum or Powell.
But the jazz expert, if unable to mold public opinion through direct criticism, can fulfill many other valuable functions. The most important of all has been John Hammond, more a catalytic agent than a critic, responsible for the launching of the entire swing era (via Benny Goodman), of the boogie-woogie piano phenomenon, of such talents as Count Basie and Teddy Wilson and innumerable others for whom he secured jobs, agency contracts and record sessions. The major contribution of Dr. Marshall Steams was his founding of the Institute of Jazz Studies, the unique jazz research center.
The objectives of the present book are twofold. In the early chapters I have attempted to put between covers for the first time some recollections of the early days of jazz. They may help to counterpoise, against the enormous documentation concerning New Orleans, a number of views that present other sides of the picture. Recollections of New Orleans have been presented extensively in a dozen books; no attempt has been made here to overlap into this well-covered ground. In the main this is a book about the present and future of jazz rather than its distant and endlessly chronicled past.
Its second and main objective has been to offer, in narrative form, a series of instrument-by-instrument histories enabling the reader to see each artist’s role, period of impact and relative importance, and to correlate this information with the recommended phonograph records. These instrumental chapters will, I hope, be of value both to the young jazz fan who asked me the other day “Who is Frank Teschemacher?” and to the older aficionado who meekly inquired: “Who is Al Cohn?” There will be areas of information for the musicians themselves; recently a noted west coast jazzman startled me by asking: “Who is Bessie Smith?” There are also several musical illustrations, with analyses, of solos by performers most of whom have never before been the subjects of this kind of scrutiny in a jazz book.
I have not attempted to present the personal stories of these artists, most of whom were represented in Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff; nor is there any extensive attention to the African backgrounds and other prejazz historic data, since this would merely duplicate the exhaustive documentation in Dr. Stearns’ The Story Of Jazz.1
The main intent of these chapters is to focus attention on the comparatively small number of artists who are key figures in their respective categories. There is a secondary group in each chapter whose contributions, though of no major significance to jazz history, have given considerable pleasure to fellow-musicians and jazz lovers. Though every artist in the leading group has been mentioned, the inclusions and omissions in the second category have necessarily been to some extent arbitrary, since the number of those who have played first-class solos at some period in the history of recorded jazz runs into the thousands.
After all the dust of critical controversy has settled, it will be found in due course that the musicians whose contributions deserve to be remembered will survive regardless of how they fared at the critics’ hands (witness the cases of Gillespie and Parker, both crucified in print at the time of their struggle for a break-through to esthetic acceptance). It will also be found that no matter where we draw the lines between jazz and popular music, classical music, Afro-Cuban, Latin-American and all the other musical forms that impinge upon jazz in varying degrees, the music that has in it an honesty and freshness of conception, allied with conviction and musicianship and integrity in its execution, regardless of whether or not it be called jazz, will survive in the record collections of our children and of the generations to come.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
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Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
