Dan Morgenstern

[Brad]

Has anybody picked this up yet. It just came out this week and I was wondering if there was any feedback about it yet.

[JSngry]

Forgot about this one, what with Mr. Kart's outstanding tome occupying center stage right now in the ol' biblioteca del bano, but this should be great. Morgenstern's long been a favorite of mine. Factual knowledge out the wazzoo, a genuine enthusiasm for the music that he's not afraid to let come through in his writing, and a writing style that reads so easily it's almost like hearing a voice speak.

If this is a collection of liner notes, essays, etc., I really hope the notes for the Prestige issue of the Gillespie big band's Salle Pleyel concert are included. I lost my LP about 20 years ago, and have since gotten the music on CD. But those liners still stay in my memory. Got the album when I was, like, 16 or 17, and that was when Prestige liners were more often than not freakin' ESSAYS. The combination of youthful spongelike enthusiasm, that great music, and those liner notes made a huge impression that still lingers.

As did Morgenstern's Down Beat concert review of the Newport-In-New York Jam Session with Mingus and Buddy Tate and Charles McPherson and Milt Buckner and Cat Anderson and Alan Dawson and Jimmy Owens and Roland Hanna (and Morgenstern's little "editor's interruption" of the record's review when the reviewer didn't hear it like Dan had. Maybe you had to have "been there", but I tell you, it was cooler than shit!). When the record finally came out, it was like I already knew what it sounded like, FELT like, even, because of Morgenstern's review. I even "heard" the Mingus/Wein hug at the end of it, even though it wasn't actually on the record. That's how good a jazz writer Dan Morgenstern is.

I mean, you GOTTA love the guy who (positively) described Albert Ayler's music as sounding like "a Salvation Army band on acid", right?

Edited November 19, 2004 by JSngry

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Yes, I got this on Wednesday at the release party. It was a great evening with friends, family, fun, food. Off the top of my head, folks like Bill Crow, Albert Murray, Scott Wenzel, Charlie Graham, Dorthaan Kirk, et al. were there, as well as all the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies staff. There were also a number of university officials, etc. since this event was sponsored by the RU library system.

(Some nice music too, from James Chirillo, Loren Schoenberg, Dick Katz, Joe Wilder, Daryl Sherman, Joe Peterson - oh, Nancy Harrow sang one too).

Obviously, this book is a must-have if you are a fan of jazz writing at all. Morgenstern is undisputably one of the best and has been on the scene, in the very thick of things, for five decades. There are some real gems in this book. One of my favorites is his piece "Discography: The Thankless Science" which is a great overview. It was originally in the Down Beat yearbook (1965 or 1966, I forget which) and has never been reprinted elsewhere. So only a few have seen it. Dan also updated it with a page or so more of later developments.

There's a large portion on Duke & Louis, a section on record reviews, one on liner notes, some live reviews, I forget what else. Oh, a nice autobiographical section at the start. If there are questions about specific pieces, ask me later when I have it in front of me. I know they included a section on "controversy" which includes the review of the 1966 concert with Rollins, Coltrane, Hawkins, Zoot, and Yusef. By and large not a favorable review. Several years back I talked to Dan about that and he had vivid memories of the show.

No photos in the book, unfortunately, but all in attendance on Wednesday got a program which included a full sheet of photos.

Apparently it can be had for under $20 online. Do it. Now. Yes.

Mike

P.S. - while the concept is the same as Larry Kart's book, one can't possibly consider these as "competition". Apples and oranges, both very tasty.

P.P.S. - Speaking of very tasty, Jim may need to adjust his diet to get double the reading time. And this book is 700 pages worth.

[Brad]

After reading the last two posts, that's all I need to know. However, I am quite jealous about the release party. That must have been something else.

[pryan]

I picked this "tome" up yesterday. Totally missed this thread the first time around. Was kind of an impulse buy for me, but I'm really getting into jazz writing and this obviously one of "the" books or collections of various forms of jazz writing to have. I've only skimmed it, but this is the kind of book that you'll refer back to again and again. Oh yeah, Brad there's profiles of Dex and Stitt, a couple of your faves.

[Brad]

Paul,

Thanks for the tip. I'm getting this one for xmas so am looking forward to it.

[garthsj]

A major contribution to the jazz literature .... the collected wisdom of someone who knows and understands jazz and musicians. I managed to get a "used" copy through Amazon from Strand Books (how I miss that store!) for less than $20.00. It was obviously a mint "review" copy, as it still had the publisher's info sheet inside. A pity that some reviewer did not enjoy it enough to make it a permanent part of his/her library. I have delved into various parts of the book, and particularly enjoyed the piece on Charlie Haden, written in 1967, which told me a lot a I did not know.

Larry Kart's book in next in my acquisitions list, but I also have to remember to meet my own publisher's deadlines this holiday season ...

Garth.

[AllenLowe]

Yes, have the Morgenstern book; along with Larry's Book, which I've read, we have an embarassment of critical riches. Great stuff; I particularly like the piece on Prez at Birdland, but there's a lot to choose from. People have been at Dan for years to do this, and it's great to have it. My only complaint, and I've emailed Dan about this, is that it doesn't have the liners he did for the Decca reisssue of Armstrong's "Collector's Items" - these were the notes that almost single-handedly forced a revision of the common (ie Schuller) view of Armstrong's post-1935 work, and they influenced a lot of people. Get this book as well as Larry's, which is one of the best collections I've read in a long time -

[Larry Kart]

I'm at page 201. Lots of old friends, but my favorite so far (and not only, I think, because it was new to me) is the 1962 Hot Lips Page piece. Seems to me that it encapsulates with special strength (as do "Lester Leaps In" and "Paul Desmond" to come, of the ones that I recall right now) one of the "secrets" (if that's to way to put it) of Dan's character and thus of his relationship to the music -- the width and depth of his empathy with the width and depth of what's really going on, which in turn can lead to the same thing flowing back, wide and deep, from the music and the players to him ... and back and forth and on and on.

[desertblues]

Got my copy today at a local Borders (coupon printed from this board helped ease the pain of the $35 list price!). Thanks to all you previous posters for recommending this one; I knew I had to have it right away! I am pleased to see it includes the Commodore, HRS & Keynote material (as well as his Mosaic Records piece) in the "Recording Jazz" section. A welcome addition to my jazz library.

[Leeway]

A major contribution to the jazz literature .... the collected wisdom of someone who knows and understands jazz and musicians. I managed to get a "used" copy through Amazon from Strand Books (how I miss that store!) for less than $20.00. It was obviously a mint "review" copy, as it still had the publisher's info sheet inside. A pity that some reviewer did not enjoy it enough to make it a permanent part of his/her library. I have delved into various parts of the book, and particularly enjoyed the piece on Charlie Haden, written in 1967, which told me a lot a I did not know.

Larry Kart's book in next in my acquisitions list, but I also have to remember to meet my own publisher's deadlines this holiday season ...

Garth.

A lot of the reviewers need the money more than the book. In fact, selling off review copies keeps some of them fed until their next assignment. B-) That's bee a longtime tradition of the freelance-- and not so freelance-- writer/reviewer/critic. No reflection on the book at all.

[garthsj]

A major contribution to the jazz literature .... the collected wisdom of someone who knows and understands jazz and musicians. I managed to get a "used" copy through Amazon from Strand Books (how I miss that store!) for less than $20.00. It was obviously a mint "review" copy, as it still had the publisher's info sheet inside. A pity that some reviewer did not enjoy it enough to make it a permanent part of his/her library. I have delved into various parts of the book, and particularly enjoyed the piece on Charlie Haden, written in 1967, which told me a lot a I did not know.

Larry Kart's book in next in my acquisitions list, but I also have to remember to meet my own publisher's deadlines this holiday season ...

Garth.

A lot of the reviewers need the money more than the book. In fact, selling off review copies keeps some of them fed until their next assignment. B-) That's bee a longtime tradition of the freelance-- and not so freelance-- writer/reviewer/critic. No reflection on the book at all.

As someone who reviews lots of books, I am well aware of this tradition (although in academic circles it is considered a questionable activity, nevertheless widely practiced when the "used book man" comes around with ready $$$). My comment was basically suggestive that this book is one of those exceptions that should remain on the library shelves of any reviewer who claims to have an expertise in jazz ... in other words this is not a review copy that I would have sold to Strand for about $5. His loss, my gain, though!

Over many years of experience with publishers of all kinds, I am often mystified about how their publicity departments work or don't work. I can regale you with many horror stories ... but that is a subject for another time ...

Garth.

[ghost of miles]

I mean, you GOTTA love the guy who (positively) described Albert Ayler's music as sounding like "a Salvation Army band on acid", right?

I did not realize Morgenstern was the source for that quote--I've repeated it many times to friends who've asked what Ayler sounds like.

The book is a beauty; my wife gave it to me as an early Christmas present, and within minutes of opening it I'd come across two passages that I'm going to use in upcoming radio programs. Just ordered a copy for a fellow DJ friend in order to, as Joe Milazzo says, "keep the positivity flowing."

[JSngry]

Well, I think that was Morgenstern's quote. Pretty sure that it is, 99% or so certain. But if I'm wrong, I need a good correctin'...

[JSngry]

Who's got the best price on this?

[garthsj]

Jim .. Take your choice .. new or used .... these are the best prices on the net ... Of course, if you wander up and down the streets of Manhattan who knows what you might find being sold on the sidewalk.. Click here ..

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037...1655193-0730225

Edited December 15, 2004 by garthsj

[Brad]

Jim, there's a few of these already at Abe Books.

[BruceH]

Ordered it. With luck, it may come before Christmas.

[JSngry]

Thanks.

[jlhoots]

Who's got the best price on this?

http://www.booksamillion.com

New only.

$18.90.

Free shipping for orders over $25.

Edited December 16, 2004 by jlhoots

[brownie]

The New York Times reviews Dan Morgentsern's latest opus in their Books section...

'Living With Jazz': It Does Mean a Thing

By ALFRED APPEL JR.

LIVING WITH JAZZ

By Dan Morgenstern.

Edited by Sheldon Meyer.

Pantheon Books. 712 pp. $35. 

DAN MORGENSTERN has been writing about jazz for more than four decades but has long hesitated to collect his best pieces. At last, ''Living With Jazz'' gathers 136 of his liner notes, critical essays and other writings, and the book is a cause for celebration since it deserves to be on the short shelf of essential books on the music.

The sections collecting record reviews and accounts of concerts constitute a compelling documentary record of often thrilling performances, most notably from the 1950's and 60's -- the last time musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk would enjoy wide popularity (all were on the cover of Time). Jazz itself could be termed popular music only during the swing era, in its big-band incarnation as dance music. Radio, now lost to adult music, made swing, Bing and Toscanini popular; Armstrong even had his own radio show.

Morgenstern's liner notes transcend the shallow, if not promotional, nature of the genre and manage to blend keen musical analysis with biographical commentary. He has mastered this balance while setting the standard for the kind of expanded program notes made possible by boxed LP sets and the advent of booklets with compact discs. All of his writing is enriched by his extraordinary command and recall of recorded jazz.

Morgenstern's fluent, unmannered narrative style is ideally suited to the profile form; with Whitney Balliett, he is as sensitive as any critic has been to the human side of the jazz scene. He writes with particular warmth and acuity about musicians like Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell and Milt Hinton. He is both lyrical and critically persuasive on Lester Young, arguing against prevailing negative opinion in favor of Young's late recordings, his personal travails notwithstanding.

The opening section, ''Armstrong and Ellington,'' is the book's strongest. Eleven essays, written over many years, cohere to form a first-rate survey of Ellington's career. The eight reviews and essays on Armstrong collectively reveal that no one has written better or more lovingly about Satchmo. Morgenstern's 1994 essay ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' actually covers Armstrong's entire lifetime and is the best short introduction to the man who, he writes, ''spread love, happiness and beauty.'' Morgenstern's laser-beam memory locates musical sources for the bebop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in Armstrong recordings from 1929. As Miles Davis said, ''You can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played -- even modern.''

The year 1929 was also epochal for Armstrong, who, in a successful bid for a wider audience, abandoned his small recording group with its traditional jazz repertory in favor of a big band that featured him performing Tin Pan Alley songs like ''Star Dust'' and ''Body and Soul'' instead of successors to the purely instrumental ''Potato Head Blues'' (1927). ''A sellout!'' wailed jazz purists and commissars. This monolithic myopia went unchallenged until Morgenstern began attacking it, most assertively in liner notes to a 1969 reissue of 1930-32 recordings; he argued that Armstrong's art peaked in the 1930's. Soon, Armstrong's best recordings from 1935 to 1943, ignored in the jazz literature, were made available to Armstrong enthusiasts who had never heard about them, let alone listened to them -- magnificent recordings like ''Ev'ntide,'' ''Jubilee,'' ''Lyin' to Myself,'' ''Swing That Music'' and ''I Double Dare You.'' Morgenstern's pivotal role in the second coming of this radiant body of great American music is comparable to Malcolm Cowley's in his 1946 anthology ''The Portable Faulkner,'' which prompted the reissue of out-of-print novels like ''The Sound and the Fury,'' ''As I Lay Dying'' and ''Light in August.''

Although Armstrong is now called iconic and canonical -- recognized as our greatest jazz figure -- he and Faulkner may well be in the same boat, cut off from any substantial audience by the vast surround of popular culture. We know that Faulkner now belongs to unpopular culture -- that is, read only when assigned in class. But we have no idea if the young are even listening to Armstrong, who died in 1971. Jazz should henceforth be labeled ''art music,'' because this would clearly mean that if it is to survive, it must be disseminated in classrooms and institutions like the proposed Jazz Museum in Harlem. Jazz curriculums continue to be developed for every level. Morgenstern, since 1976 the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, never mentions jazz education, curiously enough. However, his essay ''Satchmo and the Critics'' offers a valuable pedagogic documentary record, with ample quotations from the surprisingly harsh criticism Armstrong endured throughout his long career.

Although literary scholars customarily consider the most compromising and vexing aspects of their subjects in an unblinking fashion, jazz writers like Morgenstern often seem advocates as much as critics, their defensiveness easily understood in the context of cultural if not racial snobbery. But now that Ellington, Armstrong and their peers have won the respect and close attention of musicologists, cultural critics and pedagogues alike, they should be considered with the complexity they deserve. How good are Ellington's extended works? What does one make of his so-called ''jungle music,'' black musicians making eccentric animal-like sounds on their horns? Is it a form of modernist irony -- primitivist condescension upended? Morgenstern is not alone in ducking such hard questions. And what do we make of Armstrong's persona of joy, ebullient and ingratiating? This minstrelsy aspect of Armstrong is crucial, although ignored or de-emphasized by friendly critics like Morgenstern.

Ideally, the bracing art of jazz would help to reduce or neutralize the nihilistic spell cast by current popular culture, from the aestheticized mayhem of action movies to the misogyny of hip-hop. ''Thanks a Million,'' Armstrong sang in 1935, wearing his heart on his sleeve, which is why we turn to jazz, why we need it.

Alfred Appel Jr.'s most recent book is ''Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce.''

Edited December 18, 2004 by brownie

[Larry Kart]

Dan's book is terrific, but Appel seems to me to be something of a riding-his-own-hobby-horse nitwit, as he was in spades in his book "Jazz Modernism" (though as I recall that's an opinion with which some here disagree). Also, I'm more than a little annoyed at the blandly high and mighty tone Appel adopts here -- given my feelings about the relative merit and knowledge of the field of these two men and my witness of/participation in an actual social encounter between them several years back, in which Appel's stance alternated between preening peacock and fawning abjectness. Yes, the reviewer's role tends to foster that high and mighty tone, but the Appel I witnessed that day is one of those guys who lives his life in order to adopt it whenever possible. And how could he miss the one thing that leaps out from this book as much as anything else does -- the loving character of the man who wrote it and the way he and the music have loved each other and, as the title says, lived together since he was a boy. That's Dan's story, or the one from which all his other stories spring, and it's all of our stories too.

[AllenLowe]

Per Larry's post, there may be a bit of passive-aggessiveness to his Times review, some payback, as I know that Dan has expressed reservations about Appel's book - I don't know for certain, however, if Appel is aware of this -

[desertblues]

Appel is right about one thing at least, the opening "Portrait Of The Artist..." essay is indeed the best introduction to Satchmo out there - should be required reading in our highschools.

[John L]

And what do we make of Armstrong's persona of joy, ebullient and ingratiating? This minstrelsy aspect of Armstrong is crucial, although ignored or de-emphasized by friendly critics like Morgenstern.

"Crucial" for what? For an evaluation of the importance or quality of Armstrong's music?