A Look At "Why Jazz Happened"

There is much to fascinate here. It's rare to find a book with so much information which also reads so easily. Marginal Jazz fans will find a ton of material to interest them. Hard-nosed jazz-istas will too, but they may find themselves at odds, as I did, with some of the broad conclusions Myers forwards here.  

I admit up front that I tend to be uneasy in the face of someone else's certainty concerning musical/ historical constructs. Even a dizzying array of facts seldom nails anything down for me. Take the truism that artists reflect the times in which they operate: 
Easy to say, sez me, 
But much harder to prove specifi-cally. 

There are, for example, many jazz musicians born in 1985 who fashion their playing after bebop heros long mouldering in their graves. Maybe the fact that these musicians have heard hip hop or watched Dancing With the Stars is in there as part of their internal art-making process along with many hours of listening to Charlie Parker, but it's not so easy to parse out those influences. The process is always subject to conjecture, projection, bias, limited information; even with (especially with?) the words of musicians to back up your case.

On a larger scale, this is what Myers is trying to do in this book: anchor specific musical changes and content to historical, non-musical events. In service of this, he brings a laudable amount of research and scores of interviews, creating a book that is always interesting, sometimes enlightening, but occasionally too apt to push what is really conjecture into the realm of the authoritative.  


Myers gives us an interesting account of the reasons for the growth of L.A. after WW II and tries to tie those events to the onset of "West Coast" jazz. His chief witness is saxophonist Dave Pell, who clearly had a hell of a time, but I don't buy the case that tract housing developments, sunshine, beach, golf and the movie industry made specific musical things happen. Myers says: "The sound suited its surroundings, placing a new emphasis on instrumental harmony, fluid execution, and polished teamwork"(p.94). Hmm. If Gil Evans and the whole New York Birth of the Cool crowd wasn't fluid, polished, etc., who was? Myers also talks a lot about how L.A. separated musicians because distances, driving, running between studio gigs, etc. meant that there was much less hanging out in the kind of places that thrived in NYC. Is this also the kind of environment that would promote the sound of "instrumental harmony, fluid execution, and polished teamwork" noted above? Don't think you can have it both ways.

A clear tale is told here of how racism operated to close down jazz activity on black Central Ave. and provoke black musicians to move to the East Coast. But there are also enough stories in jazz folklore about racism in NYC, harassment over drugs, cabaret card suspensions, etc., that the idea of NYC as a racial refuge doesn't ring true; even more so because the book acknowledges that on neither coast did racism between jazz musicians seem to be a problem.

The section on how R&B affected jazz gathers much interesting information, but the underlying thesis is not convincing: hard bop as an attempt by jazz to "remain relevant" by infusing jazz with the beat and funk of R&B. Myers quotes Gene Seymour here: "Instead of grasping for greater complexity, hard bop provided jazz music with an innovative way of keeping things simple (p121)." I don't hear it in the music. Myers cites Elmo Hope, Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Benny Golson as hard bop composers. He says that hard bop had a "harder, more unified sound. (p.134)" and that it "added a back beat-a strong accent on the second and fourth beats of each measure(p.134)." I just can't buy it, even with Lou Donaldson kind of backing up the case. There were certainly some tunes that were more funky, but the predominating modality was instrumental virtuosity and a bop approach in the rhythm section. I can't see "Joy Spring" wooing away Earl Bostic fans. (It's cool, though, to learn that William Kunstler was the lawyer who helped Gigi Gryce incorporate to gain control of his music).

The chapter on the G.I. bill enabling a lot of musicians to acquire more formal music lifts a veil on the jazz-classical connection. I agree with Myers that formal classical training impacted jazz, but we disagree on what that specific impact was. Myers says that the result of this training was "a more complex form of jazz" (p.47). OK, if you're just talking about Third Stream music-and I see that music as more complicated only in terms of form, not improvisation. 

I think the major effect of this training was not that jazz itself became more complex, but that trained jazz arrangers were able to move into film and television work and to work with more popular artists on recordings. Examples: Buddy Collette, Teo Macero, Dick Hyman, Nelson Riddle, Henry Mancini, Andre Previn and Bill Holman. 


Jazzwax, Myers' blog, is superlative. It contains scores of interviews with musicians and music industry people. By putting many of his interviews in service here, Myers seems to want to make the tone of the book something in between just plain history and an oral history like Hentoff's "Hear Me Talkin' To Ya." But it sometimes begats a pastiche feeling. A sub chapter will start; you will see a quote; there will be a digression, then other quotes arise that recapitulate the start of the sub chapter, sometimes saying essentially the same thing. A story or a quote sometimes shifts chronology in a way that doesn't completely make sense. In the chapter on the rise of amplification in rock, we start out with Woodstock and go back to the mid 60's.  

The internationalist Indian and African aspect of John Coltrane's playing is referred to, as is Trane's few allusions to the civil rights struggle in the titles of songs. But there is no effort to explain the spiritual influence Coltrane had and still has on the music and the musicians. The interior voyage of a musician is fueled by an incalculable number of personal experiences and is not easily quantified. I think this is where the difficulty of relating musical processes to historical events comes home to roost. 

Does this mean I think it's a vain exercise to try and connect historical/technological events to musical content? Definitely not. There are conclusions here with which I take absolutely no issue-the ramifications of the Musicians Union recording bans of the 1940's; advances in recording-tape, the LP, the 45 and with amplification; Black separatism influences and others. If just as a gathering of information and oral history, Myers' effort is invaluable.

But wrapping things up into a too-neat theoretical bundle can be problematic. As with Dr. Frankenstein's efforts to create life, you can try and make sure that all the parts you put into the body are top grade and even then, there are no guarantees. You have to be ready to accept that your creation might pique the ire of restless villagers armed with pitchforks, torches and blogs (nothing personal, Marc).

"Stereotypes in Black Music" by Alan Kurtz, reviewed by Steve Provizer

Author Alan Kurtz's thesis is: since at least the turn of the 20th century, African-American performers have been fulfilling and/or re-inforcing stereotypes of the naturally-rhythmic primitive savage-i.e., sustaining "white ethnocentric fantasies"-to advance their careers. Episodes include: Minstrelsy, the "coon song" craze, vaudeville, popular black theater ("In Dahomey," Shuffle Along," etc), Ellington's "Jungle Music," Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, bebop, R&B, the jazz avant-garde of the 60's, disco and rap/hip hop.

Mr. Kurtz says he wants the book to "rankle" and just to make sure-unlike Monty Python's Inquisitioners-he never bothers with the comfy chair. Instead, he wields the weapons of sarcasm and innuendo. The rhetorical bombast doesn't fully negate the credibility of his thesis, but it does make reasoned argument and subtle analysis seem less important to the author than the need to vent.

Mr. Kurtz would like to re-write the book on many musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. He calls Dizzy the "Carmen Miranda of Bebop," whose interest in Latin rhythms was calculated solely to take advantage of pop trends and broaden his popularity. It's interesting that Dizzy kept up that charade for another 50 years.

Mr. Kurtz sucks all the spirituality out of Coltrane's life and music and simply reduces him to being one of the purveyors of "New Black Music" of the 60's. "...the New Black Music," he says, "represented no one and nothing beyond the lacerated ulcerations of a few pathologically dyspeptic outpatients with saxophones."

Almost half the book is given over to an analysis of hip hop lyrics. It is a wearisome litany for several reasons. First, for little-old bourgeois me the lyrics themselves are pretty vile. They speak for themselves, but Mr. Kurtz won't let them. A biting and incessant sarcasm accompanies us through the journey. Was hip hop's lifestyle and music simply a play for more market share, a reversion to savagery or might there be some other social elements at play? The author does attempt to provide a cultural context, but the parameters of his context consist only of censorship-crazed prigs, calculating records execs and gagstas. Any other approach to hip hop gets not short shrift-it gets no shrift.

Mr. Kurtz chooses to look at episodes like Louis Armstrong wearing a jungle costume in a Hollywood movie not in the light of the pervasive racism of the time, nor does he leave room for the possibility of Armstrong's transcending the trappings of the part. In this book, character is one-dimensional, motivations base and deeds irreversible. This is why Abbey Lincoln's posing for an early processed-hair ad means her future political activity can't be taken seriously.

Does he occasionally sweep away some race-based cant? Yes. For example, his analysis of the difference between Joe Turner and Bill Haley's version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" seems on the money: it was energy that elevated Haley over Turner, not racism. His explanation of why and how some black R&B artists were able to cross over without compromise is well reasoned.

Mr. Kurtz's breezy style often seems out of place, but is easy to read and sometimes good for a laugh, as when he calls a Life magazine round table on modern art "..an overlong exhalation of hot air by Fifteen Distinguished Windbags."

There's an occasional hint that the author sees more layers than he lets on, saying that the goal of  "Enacting totems of their own debasement," may perhaps be "...to defuse the totem's power by, in effect, beating your enemy to the punch–-even if it means punching yourself in the face." Then, he adds: "Or it may betray a deeper sense of collective inferiority."

He puts a disclaimer in the first chapter: "This is not an indictment of African Americans as a whole or of their music generally[his bold], but rather a critical look at one microscopic slice of black culture." That seems to be an invitation to judge his ideas on their own merit, but the author's narrow perspective undermines that effort.

Once in a while, it would have been nice for Mr. Kurtz to step back, take a deep breath and enjoy the music of an ocean vista. As it is, he chooses to relentlessly scrutinize a single drop of water trapped on a microscope slide, and everything he sees looks like it escaped from a horror movie.

For another perspective on this book, there's an excellent analysis done by Ed Leimbacher at his blog Eye Witness.

I also suggest reading the various, contentious blog postings about Randy Sandke's book "Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythol­ogy, Pol­i­tics, and Busi­ness of Jazz."