The Penguin Jazz Guide (6 page)

For a major art form, jazz is still disarmingly young. It is possible, even now, to speak to a man who once listened to men who had been present at the birth of the music. This means that nothing in jazz is impossibly remote, and yet it too has its event horizon, for we can know nothing – or nothing beyond hearsay – of jazz before it was taken down and preserved on record. To that degree, the history of jazz
is
the history of jazz recording.

Not until Stravinsky was a classical career significantly shaped by recordings, but jazz came along at a remarkable moment of cultural and technological change. The means to preserve and reproduce it were there from the beginning, and this played some part in the music’s unprecedentedly rapid spread. If we take the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s pioneering jazz recordings of January and February 1917 as the moment the music’s history begins, then by the end of the decade the music was not just known by a popular craze across Europe, and by the middle of the next decade it thrived on every continent.

Jazz was the first cultural phenomenon to justify the term ‘viral’. Three different contagions stalked the world in 1918 and 1919. The most obvious was so-called ‘Spanish ’flu’, which actually had its origins in Midwest army camps and was carried to Europe when American soldiers began to be sent in support of the war against the Kaiser. By 1920, the pandemic had claimed what is now estimated to be between 50 million and 100 million lives across the globe. There might seem little connection between the H1N1 virus and a new form of popular music, but the parallels are striking. Jazz spread along the very same vectors, brought out of America to Europe, Asia, South America and Australasia by representatives of a country which had suddenly turned its back on its isolationism and was anxious to bring the American message to the world. As if to confirm the connection, whenever the jazz bug bit, moral guardians were quick to characterize the music itself as febrile and convulsive, and instinctively likened it to an infection: jazz was ‘hot’; those who danced to it appeared to be in the grip of dangerous rigours; it exhausted the body and depleted the spirit. And it was unstoppable, carrying off the young and the fit, much as the ’flu did.

There was a third contagion. In 1917, the Tsarist government of Russia was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, a party whose avowed aim was the world spread of Communism. Almost as soon as it was born – and with scant regard to the ironies of presenting a music born in the aftermath of slavery as a banner for American freedoms – jazz was being presented as the music of individuality and self-reliance, a freethinking rhythm to set against the fixed march of Marxism. Needless to say, as Frederick Starr and others have shown, Russians were just as susceptible to jazz as everyone else.

It would be convenient to collapse the history of the two world wars of the 20th century and suggest that jazz was carried across the world by the sudden availability of jazz records. In fact, the main vectors remained for the moment human. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (who lost one member to the ’flu) were in England a year after the war. James Reese Europe’s orchestra toured the following year. It would be some time before jazz records became the main vehicle, and only after the original association of jazz and social dance was severed.

It is another of the ironies of the music that at the time and in the place where jazz was at its most creative and fresh, jazz recording was most scant. There are almost no jazz records from New Orleans in the 1920s, though jazz was certainly born there. To complicate matters, it is clear that some musicians at least were suspicious of the music – Freddie Keppard feared that his ideas would be stolen – or misunderstood what was required of them and changed styles when they entered a recording studio, playing music that was far more formal than any they would have played at a dance or rent party. A music that famously
flourished in the whorehouses and shebeens of Storyville was curiously eager to clean up its own act when the world listened.

Quality and quantity always exist in a series of curious inverse relationships. When the very best and newest jazz was being made, there was no one taking it down. Arguably – though we argue against it – when the music reached the end of its creative evolution, jazz recording became unstoppable, making use of new technology again to flood a very small market with an impossibly large amount of ‘product’.

When we began writing the
Penguin Guide to Jazz
(then quaintly subtitled
on CD, LP and Cassette
) twenty years ago, it was just about possible to claim that our first edition covered every jazz recording that was commercially available at time of writing. Two decades later, with LP and cassette consigned to the dustbin of history, that is no longer even remotely conceivable. The advent of CD and, very quickly thereafter, a vast proliferation of artist-owned labels – so much for the doomsday scenario of 1990 that one day soon everything would be run by two or three giant corporations – meant that there were soon many times too many CDs around even for two gluttonous listeners to listen to, let alone listen to often enough to form a proper judgement. What began as a comprehensive survey of available jazz recording has perforce evolved into a more selective account, though one that in its last edition still managed to cover more than 14,000 discs.

However, another issue intrudes, and a paradox. When we first published, a far larger proportion of what was available and reviewed was relatively recent material and much of it at least notionally modernist in style. Large tracts of music from the 1930s and 1940s had slipped out of the picture. By 2000 that picture was changing. By 2010, it has changed utterly. As well as encouraging creative initiative, the CD revolution has led to an enormous return of the repressed. Jazz recording now is unmistakably dominated by the back catalogue. Inevitably, the pressures are economic. Major labels find it easier to mine their own archives for reissues than to pay for new and innovative recordings: the first enjoys a sure market, the latter only an uncertain one. In addition, with copyright set at 50 years from the recording date, more and more recorded jazz enters the public domain each year. By 2000, copyright began to expire on the LP era, and the floodgates opened. In 2010, jazz finds itself in the extraordinary situation of commanding only 3 per cent of the total music market – ‘That’s wildly optimistic!’ one record company executive recently told us – but with an array of commercial product that is wildly disproportionate to that. The rock era is only now slipping out of copyright. Check how many more early Elvis Presley compilations there suddenly seem to be.

It may seem perverse in the face of such an embarrassment of riches to scale down our operations so drastically, but when it becomes impossible to offer comprehensive coverage of jazz recordings, the only sensible recourse is to wipe the slate almost clean and start with a highly selective approach. The 10th edition of the
Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings
is very much smaller than its predecessors. It makes no attempt to cover every star in the jazz firmament, or to review every work by the stars of greatest magnitude. Instead, it offers a simplified guide to the brightest constellations and, since we have also abandoned for the moment our alphabetical organization, a way of negotiating the history of the music from its earliest moments to the present.

A great deal of those earliest moments are now once again available to us, thanks to digital remastering and to the patient work of labels like Classics (perhaps over-represented in the early pages that follow), Hep, American Music and others. Many of the names of those years are among the great names of the music, familiar to all. The challenge, though, is to balance those unquestioned masters with the musicians who are still making the music today and still carrying forward its power to innovate and refresh. While we have a certain academic sympathy with the ‘death of jazz’ rhetoric that flourished for a time a decade or so ago, it is now clear that while jazz and improvised music have pushed harmony and
rhythm, noise and silence as far as any of these is prepared to go, there is still a great deal of unclaimed land behind those frontiers where the music can still develop. Consequently, we have included a substantial number of very recent recordings in this edition.

It will be protested that it is impossible to judge whether a record made in 2004 or 2007 is ‘important’, let alone of classic status, because it simply has not been around long enough. We regard such an attitude as bad critical faith and take courage from the poet Robert Frost, who said it was laziness to leave posterity to do the work of judgement. A masterpiece is a masterpiece from the moment it is coined. The passage of time will either confirm that or, eventually and inevitably, turn it into a stepping stone for lesser talents or an Aunt Sally for ‘revisionist’ critics. Not only do we have confidence in our choices, but we are not inclined to think that jazz – however defined – came to an end in 1955 (death of Charlie Parker) or 1969 (
Bitches Brew
) or any other arbitrary date. This music is, as Richard Cook passionately argued, a long game. If it were not still thriving in 2010, that would cast negative light on what was made in 1930 and 1960 and give comfort to those who have always argued that jazz is ‘merely’ a fad.

Newcomers to the book will not by definition be troubled by changes in format. Our account proceeds chronologically from and around 1917, when the first recordings were made, to not quite the present, which always runs away from us. A total of 1001 recordings have been selected, not for any arcane musical or historical reason but because that seems enough to offer a generous spread of periods, styles and personalities, yet is a small enough sample to suggest not a canon or a ‘core collection’ (such as we proposed in previous editions) but a reasonable survey of the field in all its complexity.

Needless to say, we are not suggesting that only these 1001 recordings are worth bothering about, though that view will confidently be attributed to us (as F. R. Leavis used to say); nor that these are the only recordings by a particular artist that might be listened to. In many cases, it will be clear that a recording has been selected from many similar ones rather than as an outstanding achievement. In the case of very important musicians, or crucially musicians who have evolved over years and decades, more than one recording has been selected. This is perhaps the most perilous aspect of this edition, for we have no wish to become embroiled in a relativist discussion as to whether Duke Ellington is 1.7 times more important than Miles Davis, or Mary Lou Williams only two thirds as important as Thelonious Monk. Some artists live long lives and change endlessly; some celebrate their longevity by staying with a reliable style for decades. Some artists flash very briefly across the sky, with just a single noteworthy work; others pack an astonishing amount of change and enterprise into a tragically short span. Our selection attempts to recognize these differences.

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