JazzMF

A couple of years ago I was at a record date that featured a saxophonist. At one point, as he was doing a take of a blues, his girl friend walked into the control room and waved a hello to him. I judged that the saxophonist was not satisfied with the way the take was going, but in any case, in response to the girl’s arrival, he began to play wild wrong notes and runs, as a kind of mutual joke between them. At the end, when he entered the booth to give his girl friend a more direct hello, the a&r man on the date, with complete seriousness, said he thought the take had been just wonderful and wanted to use it.

I admit to having been, first, incredulous at and, finally, depressed by the event. The a&r man has been involved with jazz as a fan and producer for years. Yet he apparently did not hear the dizzy goofs the musician was making or his deliberateness in making them.

Thinking back over the incident, I realize now that it may be one-sided to judge the record producer harshly.

Perhaps, after all, he was having a basically honest and commendable response to the music. What he heard—or more properly, what he felt—in the saxophonist’s playing was his joy at seeing his girl friend and the emotional evidence of their irreverant musical joke. In other words, the a&r man was exhibiting something valid, human, and basic in his response to music, something without which the music would not exist for anyone. But I wonder whether such a response is enough.

Before I go further, I must admit my technical vulnerability. I make musical mistakes. And I am not interested in showing up anybody else’s mistakes as such.

I can imagine that, to a musician, the kind of comment that he sometimes hears can be puzzling. For example, I see in a recent record review in a national magazine that a particular performance, done by an important saxophonist of long standing, is “brilliant.”

What the saxophonist did on that record was to read through an old and not very well-known ballad 1 1/2 times, almost verbatim. He added a few decorations here and there, some embellishments and fills between phrases. And he delayed and anticipated a couple of phrases for about half a beat. These are the simple facts of the matter, and, assuming that I have heard the record well, they are beyond dispute and not matters of opinion. Perhaps such a nearly straight reading is the saxophonist’s idea of the best thing for him to do with that particular ballad.

Then again, I read from a well-known writer, in the set of liner notes for another LP, that such and such a selection on the record is a prime example of the way a leader can take a much-played standard and find new meaning in it. But a listening reveals that the body of that performance consists of solos by three sidemen and no solos by the leader. Further, the chord changes the leader assigned his sidemen are, to my ear at least, more or less the ones usually heard on that piece.

Another colleague spoke recently in print of “the usual jazz criteria.” Well, what are they?

Let’s go back to our first reviewer and the saxophonist’s ballad, which he called “brilliant.” Suppose the reviewer had said to himself, “What I am hearing here is essentially melodic paraphrase and embellishment. Now the highest standards for such melodic paraphrases of popular ballads were brilliantly established by Louis Armstrong in the early ’30s and buttressed soon after by Coleman Hawkins.” Such are criteria that have long been generally accepted as standards of achievement. Our reviewer might then say to himself, “This saxophonist’s reading of this ballad seems brilliant to me. Why do I think so? Brilliant, after all, is not a cheap word. I know that Louis Armstrong has unquestionably done such paraphrases brilliantly. And Coleman Hawkins has done such embellishing brilliantly. How does this saxophonist’s ballad compare with their best work? What, exactly, has this saxophonist actually done to this ballad? Now, let me ask myself again, do I really think that this is ‘brilliant’? And, if so, just how and why is it brilliant?”

And what of our liner-note writer? In his case, it would be easier to say how the leader found something new in the overworked standard his group performed. The leader’s contribution was simply to throw out the written melody of the standard altogether and devise a fresh one. Furthermore, the fresh melody is, by a clearly defensible criteria, a more interesting melody and one certainly much more appropriate to the leader’s music.

How? And why? These are the critical questions. the answers are not necessarily obscure or technical. When they are answered honestly, we all benefit; indeed, we are indebted to any man who tries to answer them as honestly as he can.

By Martin Williams

[Originally published in Down Beat, December 5, 1963, p. 40]

If we assume that it permissible to talk or write about jazz, how should one do so? In other words, should criticism be couched in lyrical, poetical, technical, dogmatic, or philosophical terms?

The first specialized jazz critics felt that their task was to judge and classify. With one hand they would weigh the merits of each individual jazzman and with the other, file him away in their catalogues. This filing system also had a certain effect on the grades given each musician, according to the critic’s personal taste: “A is probably more talented than B, but B belongs to the New Orleans school and therefore deserves a bonus for purity.” We all know that this sort of thing soon leads to dogmatism; categories give way to boundary lines and black marks to excommunications.

Why is it that we younger critics, though we may have begun by imitating our elders, have since taken a very different tack? Why do we feel that the work of our forerunners was, on the whole, very harmful, even though we are indebted to them for a number of contributions without which we might not have been able to get under way at all? It is because they seem to us naïve, impulsive, opinionated, hyperbolical, and, in the last analysis, rather futile. We do not like music to be discussed with a quaver in the voice; we do not like to see artists given grades like schoolboys by peremptory dogmatists. What was the use of those facile outbursts of lyricism, those value judgments and idealizations? What do I care if some self-styled oracle thinks such-and-such a musician is “terrific” or such-and-such a chorus “awful”? Either I am capable of realizing these things for myself or I am not. And if I am not, why should I go to swell the ranks of a congregation, persuading myself that the God-given word is right?

We have attempted to replace this form of criticism — which seems to have had some influence on you — with another, based on different standards. Our primary concern is objectivity. Like our predecessors, we feel that an examination of a given musical phenomenon should begin with a description of it. The difference lies in our choice of methods. In the past, critics were generally content to describe the emotional state aroused in them by the music under examination. Allow me to borrow from one of our readers this excellent parody of the authors you seem to appreciate: “Toward the end there’s a terrific note, not immediately after it’s gone up, but almost; then it goes down into the bass again in a crazy way and after that it’s really gone.” In this kind of criticism, the subject is often little more than a mirror in which the critic complacently gazes at his own reflection. I grant you that jazz critics are not the only ones who succumb to this temptation, as one can easily see from reading any newspaper. But this is no excuse.

It is not and cannot be the critic’s role to step into the shoes of the artist in an illusory attempt to convey to readers the poetic resonance of a piece of music. If this beauty has not been experienced, the most lyrical commentary in the world can only obtain a superficial approval from the listener. This is the pitiful result generally attained by criticism based on value judgments. We, on the other hand, refuse to assume that the world revolves around our likes and dislikes. Though we often state our preferences, handing out praise or making reservations, it is merely to acquaint the reader with our attitude toward artistic phenomena, so that he may compare his viewpoint with ours, while remaining free to form his own opinion. The practice of giving “stars” is justified only on the lowest levels of criticism, such as record tips for busy readers.

How, then, is one to describe music? Merely by stating the facts as clearly as possible. On this score, it seems, our views are farther apart than ever, for I find this statement in your letter: “Let us leave musical dissection games to those who enjoy that sort of thing; fifths, sixths, sevenths and ninths, diminished, augmented, upside down or inside out, this is not music.” I can understand your being dismayed and even revolted by these apparently forbidding terms which no one has ever bothered to explain to you. I would like to know what sort of monsters these harmless words conjure up for you. I should point out that here again you are not alone. “When I hear someone mention a seventh,” a fan once said to me, “I run.” And yet if one is at all concerned with precision, one is forced to use the only exact terms which the language has to offer. It is not, I repeat, a matter of dissecting music but merely of describing it clearly.

When musicians hear the name of an interval, it suggests something as familiar to us as the name of a color to a painter. Instead of referring to an ascending ninth, perhaps you would prefer me to say “it goes up.” And yet precision does have its advantages. If I happen to read an article in which a “sequence of augmented fifth chords” is mentioned, I shall have a very precise notion of the musical passage referred to, and if I later have an opportunity to hear the piece containing these chords, I will be able to recognize them fairly easily when they occur. Moreover, it is possible to hold and aesthetic discussion on the basis of this precise and incontrovertible fact. I should certainly be at a loss in either of these cases had the critic merely referred to “a group of tortured harmonies” or, worse yet, made up some sort of vaguely literary — or literarily vague — phrase depicting the “metaphysical anguish” allegedly produced by these fifths.

I already know your answer to that. “Your scholarly descriptions are useless to me since I don’t understand them.” Unfortunately we live in a country where children are taught to distinguish between colors but not between notes. I therefore admit a priori that the young critics — at least insofar as they deal with difficult subjects — can expect to be understood by only a few readers. There is just one remedy for this: the reader who wishes to acquire a deeper knowledge of musical matters must make an effort of his own. I feel that a young man of twenty, whose passion for music is real, should not shrink from devoting a few hours of study each week to a better understanding of the mysteries of artistic creation. For the goal of intelligent criticism is to provide the music lover with a lens enabling him to magnify, as it were, the details of a work and, at times, to glimpse certain aspects of it which are partly hidden to the naked eye.

Needless to say the problem is not a simple one. Though it is possible, through analysis, to shed light on the technical mechanics of improvised music, no one has yet been able to elucidate the outward manifestations of swing; similarly words do not seem capable of describing phenomena having to do solely with the texture of sound. These elements may simply defy analysis, though this is not absolutely certain; our intelligence should be able, in one way or another, to grasp what our sensibility has been able to feel. Man is not so compartmentalized as all that. The fact remains, however, that our methods of analyzing rhythmic and purely aural phenomena are still in their infancy. We must not forget that jazz criticism has only just emerged from childhood and must be borne with for a while.

The description of musical realities must be carried as far as may be necessary. It must be thorough, impartial, and display a maximum of intellectual honesty. This is indispensable if aesthetic meditation is to be carried out in proper perspective, for such descriptions serve to polarize meditation by making it a direct and continual function of factual observation. Analysis enables us to ground our meditation on objective, concrete reality. This does not make meditation any easier, but it can, at least, relieve it of the gratuitous character which it so often has. Please understand me. I do not believe that genius is subject to demonstration. When I describe and comment upon one of Armstrong’s or Parker’s choruses, I know perfectly well that something essential will be missing from both description and comments, something which my faculties as a whole can apprehend, and without which even the most technically perfect work can never transcend certain limits. When we feel the presence of this “something,” all we can do is say so, for does there even exist a genius capable of taking it as a theme of critical analysis? A great poet might be, though even Baudelaire’s attempt to convey the poetic essence of Wagner’s music remains unconvincing. One of the most glaring mistakes of the old-style critics was their attempt to convey the incommunicable when they were not equipped to do so. For want of any poetic genius they were reduced to homily, and floundered about ridiculously in a hodgepodge of adjectives.

I know that I have by no means exhausted the chief problems raised in your letter, but I would like to think that I have given you food for thought. I decided to step into this debate because it distresses me to see young people turn their backs on the art forms that are truly representative of their era, whether in jazz or any other field. I also felt that I had to come to the defense of criticism as I see it. You, after all, rather priggishly reduce criticism to a game for highbrows who are interested only in slaking their shameful thirst for “crossword puzzles.” I hope to have rehabilitated in your esteem a form of criticism which takes pride in limiting its investigations to tangible realities, and which has the courage to keep still rather than talk nonsense, even if this discretion is interpreted as “intellectualism”; a form of criticism which does not seek to impose prefabricated views on the reader, asking not merely his adherence, but his actual participation.

Published in Toward Jazz. New York: Grove Press, 1962, pp. 45–50.

The following passage was written earlier in the year. It is the review of a record by the Bud Shank Quartet, called Bag of Blues. “Here is the present reigning king of alto sax jazz with a trio support knocking out the greatest beat you’ll hear in many an L.P. The slows are interpreted with maximum taste and musical sympathy; the swingers start and carry on with an intense exuberance inside a highly relaxed framework. The group sounds like a unit that agrees with the selection of each other’s company. The tunes are finally selected by Shank who plays them with a conviction and a swinging style that seems to lack any inhibitions….Bag of Blues, an original by Bob Cooper, has the most interesting chord progression, and both Shank and Williamson are right with it. For swing, one tempo is as good as the other for they are all loaded with it….Bud Shank is making one of the biggest contributions to modern jazz, and he is ever improving with each record.” In its place, i.e. in the record review section of a jazz magazine, with perhaps fifty other reviews, it probably passes unnoticed. Out of its place, deprived of the friendly protection of the other reviews, it is exposed as sheer bad writing. Often it is ungrammatical; everywhere it is ugly and vulgar. And invariably with vulgarity, ugliness and bad grammar goes lack of any precise meaning. If you read through the review a dozen times, you will find that it says nothing. It must be difficult to say something about nondescript records month after month, but in that case it would be better merely to mention them rather than write about them.

It is admittedly the worst example of writing about jazz encountered. It is useful however, because it has in it all the faults that are to be found wherever you look in any jazz magazine. It is badly written. It is vulgar and colloquial, e.g. “…they are all loaded with it…”; many of its words are meaningless, e.g. “intense exuberance inside a highly relaxed framework,” etc.; what little imagery it has is as sad as dough, e.g. “here is the present reigning king of alto sax jazz…”; it is full of jazz jargon, e.g. “slows”, “swingers”, etc. But its worst fault is the number of pre-fabricated phrases (to use Orwell’s term) in it. Such a sentence as “…the slows are interpreted with maximum taste and musical sympathy…” is pre-fabricated. It is not the reviewer’s own. He knew the phrase from his reading of other jazz criticism, had read it so often that it had stuck in his memory and he finally regurgitated it here to suit the situation for which he could find no words of his own.

The bugbear with these pre-fabricated phrases is that they pass unchallenged. They sound fairly euphonious and help to pad out a sentence. A critic has no need to write what he thinks, he has only to rummage about a bit to find a phrase that suits the occasion. Here and there he may have to alter a word or two, but the pattern remains basically the same. Examples: “To my way of thinking” (i.e. in my opinion) this record “shows everyone to advantage” and “afforded us the opportunity (i.e. we were able) to assess the merits…”; “…it is not lacking in rhythmic vitality.…”, “…it caused my listening faculties (i.e. ears) to be alerted…,” for it “swings like mad.” X’s playing “leaves much to be desired.” Musician Y has “evolved a fully personal style” and has an “obvious feeling for jazz (the blues, etc.).” Z plays “with maximum taste” (“inherent good taste”) and shows his “discerning use of….” Here the writer supplies the last word and puts whatever he thinks fit. In this way you can piece together whole, meaningless sentences with the appropriate phrases. The acknowledged way to end a review neatly is to either exhort the reader to buy the record or say “…So-and-so is sorely missed on record these days….” or “…one wonders why So-and-so has not been heard more frequently on record…” It is the perfect end to the paragraph. By using such a ready-made phrase the reviewer can get it all off his chest, can finish his review and feel satisfied with it. It doesn’t mean very much, but it is a convenient way of writing – just as eating tinned food is convenient. Neither way is genuine. In the writer’s case he is not forced to think. A ready-made phrase does his thinking and his writing for him.

The poor writer cannot invent his own images, but finds ready use for those that have been handed down from earlier generations of his tribe, and this is allowed because readers have come to expect nothing better. A drummer, say, is described as “a veritable Gibraltar” or “a tower of strength” in the rhythm section. Among the brass you find that the “highly-charged trumpet passages achieved an electric atmosphere.” They “widened the eyes of modern pundits.” Or a longer example, again written about one of the Basie men. About Henry Coker, one writer said: “At the Royal Festival Hall his section leads and solos shot like rockets to the far recesses of the auditorium so strongly were they projected.” The writer tried to assist his reader to visualise Coker’s section leads by comparing them to rockets, i.e. to something sharp and tangible, in order to form a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. This is praiseworthy. But once more the writer had a hackneyed image in mind and it hypnotised him. He was forced to use it. It had sad results. The only picture he evokes is a ludicrous one, the sort that makes think he cannot be sincere.

Meaningless words are another necessity for the jazz writer, words without which he could not say his piece. The list is a mile long and would be longer if sufficient time had been spent sniffing them out. In this category are found “extrovert”, “introvert”, “spirited” (as in solos), “personal”, “angular”, “esoteric”, “lyrically” (e.g. “Cleo improvises lyrically at a fast tempo”), “sensitive”, “life”, “faculties”, “discerning”, “magnificent”, “wonderful”, “memorable”, “fine”, and “tremendous.” They are meaningless words used not only in jazz, let it be said, but also in art and literary criticism. “Facility” crops up again and again. One writer recently described Flip Phillips as: “A saxophonist with control and facility…” In the next line he says of Phillips’ guitarist (Herb Ellis) “…he plays the guitar with what seems limitless facility…” “Facility” in these circumstances sounds suspiciously as if it has no strict meaning for the writer. Yet “facility” and hundreds of words like it are used repeatedly in jazz writing. This repetition is permitted because they are words that have no precise meaning. They are hard to define, so it is less trouble to accept them as the writer’s opinion.

A close relative of the “meaningless word” family is jazz jargon. Like all jargon it means nothing to an outside reader; and, I suspect, not much to those inside, if only they will be honest. What, for example, do the two words “underrated” and “overrated” convey when they have been applied to literally hundreds of jazz musicians? Each month in any jazz magazine you can find at least five to whom either “underrated” or “overrated” are applied. I imagine a host of the underrated weeping on each other’s shoulders; and a crowd of the overrated smiling smugly because they have been able to fool somebody. These two have become part of the jazz writer’s bag of words, from which they are shaken indiscriminately. Their brothers are “torrid”, “brash”, “booting”, and “earthy”. As words of musical criticism they are peculiar to jazz and unintelligible to layman and jazz fan alike. “Aficionado” is also a jargon word. It was imported into jazz writing, I should imagine, to avoid using “fan” or “enthusiast”. It is met under the forms of “jazz aficionado” or “the European jazz aficionado” or, as one writer had it two months ago, “afficionado”. (Misprints are another curse of jazz magazines.) Yet this word is found nowhere else but in jazz; it sounds a little precious and is just as unsatisfactory as “fan” or “enthusiast” without being English. “Jazz-wise”, “solo-wise” and all the other possible combinations ending in ‘wise’ are also not English, but have been brought from America to add to the muddle of jazz jargon.

I am not against Americanisms when they add something fresh to the English language or make it more expressive. “Guy”, for example, is a useful synonym for “chap” or “fellow”. But often Americanisms are too vulgar and colloquial to be written in criticism. They are inevitably crossed out of schoolboys’ essays with the comment: “You have been seeing too many American films!” That is what our British critics must have done when one of them can write “…Basie never got to play any organ…” or “…and I should emphasise that this is one helluva book to play…” Other inadmissible Americanisms are “from way back”, “in the can” and “for my money”, which latter now seems to have penetrated into spoken English from jazz criticism. And does “outside” require a following “of”, e.g. “he is a major soloist outside of Gillespie?” Or is this the American habit of adding preposition to preposition?

There are other, less tangible faults that mar jazz criticism. They are more wrong approaches to the subject than anything else. They were seen no better than in reports earlier in the year on the Count Basie band’s tour, an event which was the innocent cause of a mass of hasty writing. I quote from one of the reports: “to sit, alternately tensed and relaxed, in my grey plush seat at the Royal Festival Hall in London (a hall, incidentally, so acoustically accurate that the grace of many a ballet performance there has been negated by the continual patter-patter-patter sound of the sylph-like creatures’ footfalls) and witness, from a distance of only twenty feet, Count Basie’s first ever concert on English soil was as invigorating an experience as an initial viewing of an Ibsen play with a West End cast after reading it in book form for many years…” etc., etc.. Of course, it may have been like that. But it does seem a bit far-fetched, and even more so when the next paragraph goes on: “William Faulkner’s volcanic doctrine (after which in the original came an asterisk and at the bottom of the page, The Paris Review, 1956): (‘An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they chose him… His only responsibility is to his art… The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies’) would appear to have fired sixteen zealous missionaries when the full might of the Basie ensemble swings into action.”

On second thoughts I would say it was definitely far-fetched and totally irrelevant to the Count Basie concert. We are not interested in whether the writer was relaxed or tensed at the time, nor in what sort of seat he was sitting, nor in ballet performances in the hall, nor in words like “negate” for “spoil” or “initial” for “first”. Comparing the first Basie concert in England to an “initial viewing” of an Ibsen play is irrelevant and hopelessly complicated. A comparison should be to the point, straightforward and not spread over several lines unless it is a good one. The writer takes the best part of a paragraph to give us Faulkner’s “volcanic doctrine” and concludes that the Basie orchestra was apparently full of this doctrine. It was a wild conclusion. It was a conclusion that could only be thought, but not written. It is the sort of thing one keeps to oneself for fear of being laughed at. It is altogether too naïve and enthusiastic. Enthusiasms need to be toned down to stand translation into print. Yet so many jazz writers, given the opportunity, go on blithely and write out their day-dreams. They must consider that a high-falutin thought or quotation will get them through, no matter what, on the assumption that a man who quotes and seems to be on friendly terms with both Ibsen and Faulkner cannot help but be learned and know what he’s talking about. In reality it sounds comic and obscures the meaning of what is really there. The trouble with enthusiasm is that you tire and the trouble with a high-falutin style is how to keep it up. This article opened to the sound of pomp, but half-way it began to flag and lapse into vulgarities of the “this is one helluva book to play” variety until the end. One style, however bad, is preferable to a mixture, especially a mixture of the inflated and the vulgar. As it was, it had six wearying pages and three photographs. The photos were good, but the writing could have been done with more honour in two pages.

In order to forestall criticism, I must confess to having been inspired by George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language. But I am not ashamed of that inspiration, since Orwell’s remarks bear repeating, and what he said about political writing can be applied fairly to jazz writing. I realise the risk of the method of close analysis chosen, since any piece, if you set out with that intention, can be made to look silly. I hope I have not done that. As wild as they may seem, the quotations (although many and tedious) have not been concocted. They were picked from the reviews and articles of twelve writers over a period of three months, as they appeared in Jazz Journal and Jazz Monthly. Just as many could have been found in any three month period. They are the symptoms of widespread bad writing about jazz. That does not mean there are no capable writers. There are; but these are generally older men with years of experience. I am considering, as far as possible, the usual impression jazz writing makes and saying what I think is wrong with it, although in this no doubt I have not avoided the very errors I complain about. But I am concerned that good English should be written about jazz, even in the humblest record review. I am concerned that, while there is so much talk of establishing valid criteria in jazz criticism, there should also be a language fit to express those criteria.

By Colin Johnson

[Originally published in Jazz Monthly, 1958]

(Response)

Colin Johnson’s “Jazz and the English Language” strikes pretty close to home, but I doubt if it will have much effect on JM’s crtics—if you were to delete all the “meaningless” words from jazz criticism there would be precious little left. I too have often wondered what words like ’angular’ and ’muscular’ meant when applied to a jazz solo. I guess what you have to do is make up your own meanings, over a period of time, based on some combination of word-assocation and conditioned reflex. Maybe a list of definitions would be of some help in translating these esoteric reviews—although I doubt it. Here are a few of my own interpretations.

Funky: By some miracle, I find myself in complete, or almost complete, agreement with Raymond Horricks about this word. It’s awful. But to tell the truth, I’ve yet to hear it used in conversation. It seems to be one of those synthetic colloquialisms, like ‘liquorice stick’, that never really live away from the printed page or the movie soundtrack. I read in Down Beat that it means ‘down to earth’ or ‘groovy’, but since Milt Jackson seems to be the number one exponent of funk these definitions don’t seem to fit too well. Examples of recorded funk: “Bluesology” by the MJQ (the Atlantic, not the Savoy version) and “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” by Carl Perkins.

Muscular: This probably doesn’t mean anything except ‘loud’, but to me it signifies a ‘rippling’ solo. Any documentary evidence notwithstanding, muscular can only be legitimately applied to a tenor solo—any other recipients are fakers.

Virile: This is another tenor word, although altos—usually Phil Woods—can qualify. It means, generally, that the musician in question is very young, probably a Negro—or Phil Woods—and plays the hard-bop style. He ripples a lot, too.

Angular: Russ Freeman’s style of playing. The inference to be drawn when this word is used is that the reviewer doesn’t really understand what he hears but suspects that it may be good, so he cleverly avoids committing himself. May also be used on Thelonious Monk, and, since it is a piano word, Gerry Mulligan, on the occasions when he forsakes the baritone for the keyboard.

Emerge: This is a popular one, although not limited to jazz. “Duke Jordan emerged in the late ’forties”—Whitney Balliett in The Saturday Review. This brings to mind (my mind) a picture of Duke Jordan struggling up from one of those smoky manholes on 52nd Street, dragging after him a piano stool and a briefcase full of transcriptions of Bud Powell solos.

Facility: This has a quite definite meaning—it signifies that the soloist referred to can, and does, play a lot of notes—similarly, Technique. Any other definition is spurious and inadmissible.

Booting: Is more difficult to pin down, but it is usually used when the tenor soloist (this is another strictly tenor adjective) is either playing with a big band or Jazz at the Philharmonic. In either case, loudness is the key factor, and a honk or two won’t come amiss.

And so on, indefinitely. I do think it mightn’t be a bad idea, though, if the various critics were to list typical recorded examples of at least the most-used of these esoteric adjectives. It should make interesting reading and would probably throw a good deal of light on some of the misconceptions we budget-bound collectors have been labouring under.

By Peter Turley

[Originally published as part of “Random Reflections on Jazz” in Jazz Monthly, December 1958, p.28]

A musician is supposed to have said recently that the criticism of jazz is a kind of joke and that there are no jazz critics. Without agreeing with him entirely, I am very sympathetic to his statement. But I say this to indicate that to me the words critic and criticism are rather special ones. A man who makes comments or reports on jazz records (or books, or plays, or movies) is not necessarily worthy of the title of critic.The criticism of jazz is, like the criticism of any other art, “popular” or “fine”, a kind of criticism. It is not a branch of publicity, nor a sideline of journalism. And a critical ability is not a natural consequence of an enthusiasm for jazz or of a knowledge of jazz although it needs both of these things.

Philosophers would have us believe that criticism is a branch of philosophy and some artists that it is a branch of creativity. But criticism has its own muse, and however much enlightenment he constantly gets from both the philosopher and the artist, the critic needs a distinct, innate critical talent, a special sensibility and way of looking at things. His task is of an order much lower than that of either philosopher or artist, of course, but the ability he needs for his job is unique and uncommon and a man either has it or doesn’t have it. If the philosopher or artist (or journalist or historian) also has this critical ability, so much the better.

I think that the state of criticism of jazz in America is low, but I also think that the criticism of movies, plays, music in general, and painting is also low. Literature is lucky—it has a top level of criticism which is an excellent counter to the average American book review.

The innate critical ability is not enough in itself. It needs to be trained, explored, disciplined, and tested like any other talent.

If I should recommend that this training should begin with Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius and end with Eliot, Tovey, and Jung, I would not be saying something academic or pretentious but merely stating the most ordinary commonplace of Western civilization as it exists. And the critic should also know as much as he can of the best criticism being written around him in all fields.

But it is also the critic’s business to be as perceptive and knowledgeable as he can. And critical perception (how much training it needs) is ultimately either there or not there.

The critic’s questions are “How?” and “Why?” not merely “What?”

The points which follow come with some changes, from Matthew Arnold. I present them, not because I am especially interested in promoting Arnold’s attitudes nor in promoting any “system”, but because they seem to me to have something to say at this moment to the jazz writer and his reader.

1. The critic’s first question is what is the work trying to do? Notice that this does not say, what do you think the artist ought to be trying to do. (It also has little to do with a swami view inside the artist’s head).
2. The second is, how well does it do it, and how and why so.
3. The third is, is it worth doing? Notice that this is the last question and not the first.
4. The critic should compare everything with the best that he knows whenever the comparison seems just and enlightening.

The questions are not easy, but no one ever said that criticism was easy, and even the very best critics can and will fail on at least some of them.

Ultimately, the critic makes a judgment, an evaluation. Value is based, in the final analysis on feeling, not reason. But by feeling, I mean a rational, conscious, individual function. I do not mean emotion which is irrational, impersonal, and can be irresponsible.

We have all heard it said that the criticism of jazz was once left to amateurs. That is not entirely true, nor is there any lack of amateurs today. But we do have now several writing about jazz who, although they really know what criticism is, don’t know enough about music. On the other hand, there are some who know music, but don’t know what criticism is. In jazz, of course, there is danger in knowing music since we are apt to apply the categories and standards of Western music rigidly and wrongly thereby. And there is also danger in knowing jazz: we may reject truly creative things because our knowledge of the past makes us think we know what a man ought to be doing—but that is true in any art.

The man who reviews jazz records has a terrible task: he can never, like his “classical” brother, judge an interpretation or performance against a norm because every jazz record is, in effect, a new work. Also, as George Orwell said of the hack book reviewer, day after day he must report on performances to which he has had little or no reaction worth committing to print—and that is true of the best critics and is neither a reflection on them nor necessarily on the music.

On the other hand, there could not possibly be as much true creativity in jazz as we are constantly told that there is, even though the medium is very much alive. How many novels, plays, poems, symphonies, paintings done in a year are really excellent?

And I wonder how many promising careers—and lives—have been wrecked because of indiscriminate over-praise. I know of a few personally. Even if a musician is wise enough to discount what passes for criticism in jazz, he would have to be inhuman not to be somehow affected by it.

There is one job in jazz criticism that is neglected and which needs to be done, I think. It is also one which, since jazz is music and music the most abstract of the arts, is very difficult.

It is a better job on content and meaning. I am not opposed to technical analysis. We need more of that, too, and it can also help us with meaning, of course.

But especially now that jazz is so sophisticated, we need to talk frankly and honestly about what it is saying.

By an examination of content, I do not mean a kind of enthusiastic impressionism. Nor do I mean the kind of clever chi-chi adjective-mongering we are all too familiar with. The critic’s duty is accuracy and he should not sacrifice it for cleverness.

Of course, such an examination cannot be made with prejudice or pre-judgment. The first question is what does this music express, not whether or not it should be expressing it.

The thing that separates listeners and commentators into “schools”, I am convinced by the way, is not musical devices—passing chords, diminished ninths or sixteenth notes, or the lack of them—but the content that such devices enable a given style to handle. I think that jazz should be able to express as much as it can possibly learn to express in its own way.

Of course, the artistic and musical expression of emotion is not the same as its communication. A snarl, a sigh, a scream—these things communicate emotion, but they are not art, only a pat of the raw material of art which the artist transforms.

I recommend this first, because greater consciousness is a part of growth in an art as well as in an individual.

I also recommend it because the appeal of jazz is still so very irrational and I do not think it should be so much so any longer. (Of course, the appeal of all art is ultimately irrational, by definition, because it is art. But to many who like jazz, its appeal is almost entirely so.) It is the critic’s business to make it less so, and unless he does, both he and jazz may be trapped. And dealing with content is the only way to give a good answer to that third question: is it worth doing?

As it is, we assure ourselves that jazz is an “art” and often proceed to talk about it as if it were a sporting event, an excuse for us to be verbally clever, a branch of big time show biz, or an emotional outburst that affected us in a way we are not quite sure of. Perhaps we can at least do our best to create the kind of climate in which a jazz critic could function and which an art deserves.

By Martin Williams

[Originally published in Down Beat, August 21, 1958, pp. 11,42]