Sonic Revolution

Page 9 March–April 2008 critics to deal with the ambiguities of Charlie Parker’s brilliance—Gennari completes his map of the discourse with attention to jazz during the 1960s. He devotes major attention to the work of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka and Ralph Gleason, and, finally, in the contemporary era (influenced by Stanley Crouch’s neoclassicism and Gary Giddins’s ability to avoid pigeon holes) fuses dozens of disparate strands of the contemporary and historical tableau. Maps of critical discourses can make for numbing prose. Not here. Gennari’s prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprisingly rich narrative structure. Central to the story is the ever-present lens of racial focus and distortion in American life and letters. As Gennari notes several times, the fact that many of the critics were white and that jazz is (if in a way no one can seem to pin down) fundamentally a black idiom creates important ripples in the discourse. Part of the brilliance of the book is Gennari’s skill for marking the ripples without concluding that some (somehow, otherwise available) Platonic truth has been sacrificed. He understands that the distortions are part of the story and, in any case, unavoidable. To this sense of intellectual , interracial tact, he adds significant, sensitive, and illuminating readings of the work of black critics , most importantly Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and Greg Tate. In the end, Blowin’Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics takes its deserved place among the most valuable books devoted to jazz. Gennari’s ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic , and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity. Ed Pavlić’s most recent book is Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. He lives in Athens, Georgia where he directs the MFA / PhD Program in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Pavlić continued from previous page Sonic Revolution Colin Fleming Coltrane: The Story of a Sound Ben Ratliff Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 272 pages; cloth, $24.00 Equally adroit at dividing audiences as parsing sound into its individual components of rhythm, meter, and harmony, the John Coltrane that emerges from this study by New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff has something of the yogi about him. Not that it’s uncommon for Coltrane bios and musical analyses to cast the tenor sax giant as a sort of mid-sixties Beatrice, a source of inspiration in the inferno of the civil rights era, against a backdrop of jazz’s New Thing, a term with its share of pejorative associations. Namely, that this was a music that had all but murdered melody, doing away with such basic musical strictures as key, and sounding like a dozen cars backfiring at once. Repeatedly. Giving the first half of his study over to Coltrane’s music before delving into that music’s broad cultural impact in the second, Ratliff posits Coltrane as a riff-blowing, note-splitting paragon of democratic ideals. Quite the little paradox for listeners who’ve long regarded Coltrane’s music as impenetrable to the poor fellow without a musicology degree—fit for museum walls, were such conceits possible, but not exactly fodder for the iPod on that jog around the neighborhood. Or so goes the rhetoric that still exists in resisting Coltrane’s music, particularly when it comes to the recordings following 1964’s A Love Supreme, the saxophonist’s suite to God, which regularly turns up on those “best ever album” lists that you find in huge-circulation rock magazines even—in turn sending the curious on to what followed in 1965, a great year for pop music in general, and the beginning of the final phase of Coltrane’s sonic revolution, when he devoted himself to the obliteration of familiar musical forms and devices. The dying John Keats exploded poetic conventions; Coltrane, nearing the end of his own life, tapped into his personal version of the analogy: if you...