Gary Giddins interview

Jerry Jazz Musician interviews Gary Giddins:

But there were many film reviewers I respected, and I didn't think my criticism added anything. In jazz, however, though I was a novice and there were obviously critics I admired, I was arrogant enough to think I had something to say that no one else was saying. Without something akin to that kind of arrogance, you can't move forward. It's arrogant to believe that anyone should read your prose, or look at your paintings, or listen to your music, or watch you act. You need a sense of certainty and in jazz I had that.

I loved jazz more than anything -- well jazz and literature, which was doing all right without me -- and I was delusional about what I could do for it. I was going to introduce jazz to my generation, rid it of stigma and mystery. I felt I could be a liaison between the rock and jazz worlds, even though I knew nothing about contemporary rock. I was out of my fucking mind. In any case, I put everything into jazz.

I can kind of relate to that. While there are several Belgian jazz magazines, I don't feel that many people are covering it intensely on an international level (puffs up chest). I may be wrong, but at least it gives me the illusion of some kind of niche to begin from. Getting an audience to fill that niche, however, is another issue...

On what not to do:
...critics I abominated -- like Pauline Kael -- who in a way were just as influential for showing me what not to do, like spending half the review attacking colleagues and the other half establishing yourself as more important than the subject under review.

On selecting albums to review:
So you're always looking for new subjects. I sample every disc that comes to my office -- every disc, no matter what it is -- and always blindfold-tested. One of the things my assistant Elora does is keep five new CD's in the changer, and if something gets my ear, we put it into a "potential" pile. The stuff I don't like at all we get rid of right away. There is a third pile -- the "second chance" pile, where I need another listen before I know if I want to consider writing about it or not.

On the industry:
I've never been anything but cynical about the record industry, which with few exceptions is an appalling enterprise. I root for the downloaders -- they have a greater love of music than its corporate gatekeepers.

In the '70s, I got to know Helen Humes, who sang at the Cookery. One night she saw me walk in and waved me over to her table. I sat down, she opened her purse, bubbling with enthusiasm, and told me she had something incredible to show me -- it was a check for about $24 in royalties, sent by Don Schlitten, who had put out "Midnight in Minton's" with Don Byas, on which Helen had a couple of vocals. She told me she had been recording since she was thirteen years old, sang with Count Basie, had big rhythm and blues hits in the forties, and yet this was the first royalty check she had ever received. She said she wasn't going to cash it, she was going to put it up on her wall. That says a lot about the record business.


Echoing what Ben Ratliff said in the post below this one:
The jazz audience is generational. People like the music that aroused their interest when they were young. They don't necessarily follow it into the next period. At the JVC Festival recently, there was a Bix Beiderbecke concert, and some guy told me that this was the best jazz band he had heard in forty years. I couldn't even respond to that. Clearly he only wanted to hear this kind of music. There are a lot of people like that. I have met people over the years for whom jazz ended with Bird or Stan Getz or Ellington. Critics are often generalists who try to follow the entire development of the music. Most listeners do not. In downtown New York, the avant-garde fans pay lip service to the earlier players -- they know and love some of them -- but that is not where their focus is. People who listen to traditional jazz basically ignore what the avant-garde does. That's the way it's always been and always will be.
(...)
For many people jazz begins with Miles. I recently received the souvenir book for the Playboy Jazz Festival, and would you believe there was not one Louis Armstrong performance among their list of the twenty-five essential jazz recordings? That's insane.

On defining jazz:
Louis Armstrong said that jazz is what you are. The saxophonist Brew Moore once said that if you don't play like Lester Young, you are playing wrong. That is why most of the people reading this conversation never heard of Moore

On Cecil Taylor's whereabouts:
I said this to you in our conversation about Cecil Taylor, that if Taylor had been white and had come out of a different background, he might have been playing to a different audience.

Yes, and he would have been recording for Deutsche Gramophone.

Exactly.

On addressing other critics in print:
I don't. I never do. Unless I am taking on another critic, which I try not to do unless I read something that really really pisses me off. When I go into the alternative universe of writing, the person I mostly write for is me. I am writing in part to the kind of fan I was when I was sixteen or seventeen, reading jazz criticism. I'm writing the kind of work that I like to read, writing to explain to myself what I'm hearing and thinking.

On the abstract nature of music criticism:
I was a substitute movie critic for Jim Hoberman in 1990, and during that time I discovered that even though I was writing the same amount of words every week, I was doing it in half the time. One reason is that so much of film writing is concrete -- that is, it deals with plot and material that you have to put in about the acting, photography, and so forth. There is far less of that when you write about music. So much of it is abstract. You are looking for concrete terms to describe the ineffable

I think he's right. I would go further and say that it is much easier to write about an album with lyrics written by the singer or band than an instrumental album. Even sung standards have, in a sense, become abstract, so both instrumental and vocal standards albums deal in interpretation, pure sound, rather than narrative. I first realised this not too long ago when I started reading the online music magazines and marvelled at the length of reviews (I marvel at their sheer bulk, but rarely feel such length justified), before I looked a little closer and saw how much of them was, at best, about the album's narrative elements and at worse about quite tangential issues, the link to which existed only in the writer's mind. (I can attack unnamed fellow critics without sounding petty when discussing criticism rather than music, right? right?!?!)

On DIY reviewing:
Criticism isn't an amateur pursuit, it's a serious craft, sometimes raised to an art. Don't get me wrong, I'm very interested in opinions -- I get letters all the time from readers who know a lot more than I do -- but criticism goes beyond opinion. It's a literary, not a musical pursuit, and something you have to work at.

You know, a Stanley Crouch may say something you think is preposterous, but he has earned the right to say it, if for no other reason than because he has lived his whole life inside this music. He has spent more time in clubs than almost anybody else I know. If this is a conclusion that he comes to, he has the right to say it, and you have to give him respect even as you disagree. I don't feel that way about some guy who owns eleven records and once went to a show at the Village Vanguard. I am just not that interested.

One difference between professional and amateur critics is that amateurs almost always prefer to write about themselves -- "the first time I heard this record" kind of thing. Jesus, sometimes I'm tempted to do it myself, and I go a little overboard in that direction in the intro to my next book. Maybe it's a consequence of getting older. But you do try to keep a lid on it; when a writer begins to see the artists he writes about as supporting characters in his own life, he's in trouble. Perception outweighs memory.

This sounds a bit pompous. Once outside the factual domain, what is a reviewer discussing if not himself and his reaction to an album? The words are simply fancier than "the first time I heard this record" and even that approach can be interesting if well-written and turned towards the reader rather than being the writer's misplaced personal diary.

From the third blind-test response (emphasis mine):
Martin Williams used to argue that we were all amateurs, basically, including himself, because we weren't musicologists. I told him I didn't buy that. Take Gunther Schuller. Nobody in the world knows more music than Gunther Schuller. He is a gifted composer and conductor and can transcribe anything, yet there are matters of taste in his books that few serious critics would accept. So, being able to transcribe and even a tremendous knowledge of music doesn't make you a more sympathetic listener. I would trust Dan Morgenstern -- who can't transcribe a solo -- on the subject of Armstrong's music more than Gunther's, even though I can learn so much more from Schuller about the way music is made. Collier is a musician, a trombonist, and he wrote an absolutely appalling book about Louis Armstrong that displayed no real understanding or feeling. How could a musician listen to the "Far East Suite" and dismiss it as a bunch of slides from a family trip?

From the sixth blind-test response:
Originally, I loved the way Ellison wrote about musicians he revered -- like Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing -- but he didn't love Parker, and this is the kind of writing you get when you don't like something the rest of the world has decided is important. You end up looking for justification for not liking it, instead of trusting your impulses... What he's done here is objectify Parker as a symbol, and so ignores the music... I don't think he saw himself as a symbol or as emblematic of Dionysian urges... I think Ellison is trying to convince himself and his fellow intellectuals that they don't have to deal with Parker as a musician, per se, because he stands for something else -- a kind of rebellion.

To me, this essentially confirms my response to the "on DIY reviews" paragraph.