Writing Jazz (review)

Writing Jazz. Edited by David Meltzer. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1999. [xix, 315 p. ISBN 1-56279-096-X. $16.95 (pbk.).]

David Meltzer's anthology Writing Jazz is decidedly not just another collection of jazz articles. Meltzer has hit upon a scheme that is sure to stimulate interest and, most likely, controversy as well. The plan is simple: present a collection of writings by white authors (Reading Jazz, ed. Meltzer [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993]) along with a companion volume of writings by black authors (Writing Jazz). Lest the division seem superficial or pointless, Meltzer provides a conceptual framework, implicit in the titles themselves. Reading Jazz reveals "the cultural colonization and reinvention of jazz as a white discourse," while "Writing Jazz represents African-American perceptions of jazz as a subject and practice" (p. xi).

Writing Jazz claims to be "the first comprehensive historical anthology of writings on jazz by African-American musicians, critics, writers, and poets" (dust jacket). Excerpts by more than one hundred contributors are organized into six chapters in loose chronological order. The chapters are framed by a "Pre-Text" and "Sub-Text" in which Meltzer interjects his own polemics in his rambling and poetic prose style. An extensive bibliography and an index of the anthologized material prove to be helpful additions to the volume.

Meltzer believes that jazz exemplifies racial division in the United States: "the line is drawn in the sand between white and black; implanted implacably as the Great Wall, divided, apart, where whites and blacks face each other tiptoeing to the ledge of a deep Grand Canyon whose bottom can't be fathomed. Only the musics arise" (p. xix). But writings by musicians themselves paint a different picture. Pianist Willie ("the Lion") Smith writes that "music does not stem from any single race, creed, or locality. It comes from a mixture of all these things" (p. 7). Saxophonist Sidney Bechet says that "no music is my music. It's everybody's who can feel it. You're here . . . well, if there's music, you feel it--then it's yours too" (p. 125). Duke Ellington speaks of George Gershwin's work as moving in "the same general direction" as his own (p. 148). Indeed, accounts by jazz musicians who were active in the 1930s and 1940s tend to support Scott DeVeaux's observation that "personal relations between blacks and whites were more collegial than in perhaps any other professional sphere of the time" (DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 168).

Meltzer's aim is to emphasize the differing perspectives of black and white writers, but what really emerges from these volumes is the contrast between jazz commentators and jazz performers, regardless of racial background. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), for example, writes that "[b]ebop rebelled against the absorption into garbage, monopoly music; it also signified a rebellion by the people who played the music" (p. 183). But Dizzy Gillespie states, "It's true, melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically, we found most pop music too bland and mechanically unexciting to suit our tastes. But we didn't attempt to destroy it--we simply built on top of it by substituting our own melodies, harmonies, and rhythms over the pop music form and improvised on that" (p. 190). Thomas J. Porter writes, "It is very important to understand that music, like all art regardless of its form, is ideological. That is, it reflects or transmits certain political, class, and national interests" (p. 229). Evidently, pianist Mary Lou Williams was unaware of this the night "we ran into a place where Ben Pollack had a combo which included Jack Teagarden and, I think, Benny Goodman. The girls introduced me to the Texas trombonist, and right away we felt like friends. After work, he and a couple of musicians asked us to go out, and we visited most of the speaks downtown" (p. 136). Ortiz M. Walton writes, "The constant drive of the bop rhythm section, coupled with an inscrutable Afro-American ethos...