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 BOOK
REVIEW
Penguin Guide To Jazz, Seventh Edition
(Penguin)
by Matthew Sumera
January 2005
“I remember Charles Mingus was going to take a critic to task not only
mentally but physically; he was very serious about it. He said: ‘What you
wrote about me is affecting my taking care of my family and paying my rent.’ And
he was correct. A critic is taking his life in his own hands. Suppose he doesn’t
like the guy, but the guy has given everything God has given him to do the job
and he says it’s nothing. He’s giving that man license to kill him.”—Max
Roach, 1970 (in Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews)
The relationship between jazz musicians and jazz critics (or the jazz critical
establishment, as some have labeled it) has long been a complicated one. Operating
on the thresholds of economics, race relations, capitalism, politics, and art,
jazz criticism has long functioned as the arbiter of taste, even when it ran
entirely counter to where the music was going. While the moldy figs may have
morphed into the “anti-jazz” critics (or the anti-eai contingency
now rearing its head), musicians on either side of any stylistic debate have
long benefited from and, in a very real sense, suffered at the hands of jazz
critics. A symbiotic relationship more than a parasitic one, though, both critics
and musicians cannot survive without each other. For in some sense, criticism
is little more than advertisement (when positive) and given the marginalized
world of jazz, any amount of public notice can only help those trying to make
a living playing the music they so much love.
From the critical side, standards have been set, and “responsibilities” to
the listening audience have been spelled out, even as that audience can sometimes
be created directly by the words of the critics themselves. At its best, jazz
criticism can rise to the level of the music, waxing profound under the guise
of objectivity, staking a claim for one’s own artistic credibility. Without
the Hentoffs, Gleasons, Spellmans, and Barakas of the world, many of us would
never have stumbled onto this music we now cannot live without.
What drove those critics to the height of their profession was not only their
ability to write powerfully about the music (oftentimes in their own idiosyncratic
ways) but also their ability to contextualize the music within the tenor of the
times. While Baraka’s criticism is most obviously routed in what was then
called “extra-musical” considerations, all great jazz critics have
understood that, as the saying goes, no sound is innocent. In reality, and at
this late stage of the game, perhaps we can all finally agree that no music exists
on purely aesthetic grounds, that nothing can ever escape the web of life in
which we always and forever remain ensnared.
And yet, very little contemporary jazz criticism strives towards understanding
and articulating this larger context, oftentimes appearing to retrench into the
world of “pure art”. What makes this critical reticence so interesting
is that the same issues affecting the world of the musician also affect the world
of the jazz critic. The music business, capitalism, and the economic reality
of devoting one’s life to understanding jazz (whether as a musician or
as a writer) makes the world of creative improvised music a perpetually embattled
arena, providing financial sustenance to only a few. Further separation between
artists and critics and a lack of shared values and community will only further
exacerbate this reality. Instead of forging understandings across the world of
improvisation, the model of musicians creating and critics evaluating can do
nothing but recapitulate the status quo. Perhaps it is time to do something to
turn things around.
With this context in mind, ongoing debates about the merits and values of the “Core
Collection” published in the seventh edition to the Penguin Guide To
Jazz seem little more than escapist minutia. Whether Braxton’s Eugene or For
Alto is designated as his indispensable recording is rather trivial given
Braxton’s commitment to the long run, demanding more from fans and critics
than inclusion in any “master list” will ever merit. Once the denizen
of trenchant yet humorous analysis, with an obvious nod to authorial idiosyncrasies
through the “Crown” designation, bestowed on the likes of Peter Kowald’s Was
Da Ist and George Lewis’ Homage to Charles Parker, the seventh
edition of the Penguin Guide to Jazz, with the inclusion of the “Core
Collection”, has gone down the path of refined consumption, catering to
the consumerism inherent in any jazz guide.
But the “Core Collection” is not the real problem with the newest Penguin
Guide, which still measures heads and toes above any similar undertaking
due to the catholic tastes and immense musical understanding of Richard Cook
and Brian Morton. The true failure of the Guide, and a further indication
that it is more committed to “collecting” (read: commoditization)
than musical enumeration is the deletion of the appendix. If jazz is, as many
of us would like to believe, a group music unlike any other, than the deletion
of a useful appendix is cause for concern. Doing so essentially obliterates the
contributions of countless non-leaders who have always been the backbone of the
music. No longer can a reader sit down and peruse the (in print) recorded output
of Billy Higgins, for example. This inability, which translates over to the inability
to see the overall connections and intermingling of the music throughout history,
significantly simplifies the story of jazz, a simplification with significant
connotations.
Critical guides to jazz certainly have their place in the continued vitality
of the music and it is not the fact that the guide exists that is of concern:
Being a faithful reader of past volumes of the Penguin Guide and having
learned of many artists through careful perusal, it would be contradictory of
me to suggest that the Guide lacks value. It is, instead, that the guide
has moved away from a commitment to expanding understandings of jazz and positioned
itself, instead, as little more than a list of “must haves” that
is of concern. Let us hope that, in the future, a better balance can be found.
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