Beginning to see the light
Philip Larkin
The Jazz Book Joachim E. Berendt (Granada £12.95) This is the ninth revision of The Jazz Book, which has sold over two million copies in 30 years: a pretty impressive record. Indeed, I find two copies on my shelves already, one a Granada paperback from 1976, the other published as The New Jazz Book by Peter Owen in 1959. Neither shows signs of exhaustive reading, and the name of Berendt does not spring to my mind as a jazz authority, in the sense of be- ing confidently referred to by others; Berendt quotes Hodeir and Schuller, for in- stance, but they do not return the compli- ment. Yet clearly he has a place in jazz
literature.
Looking at this new version shows that the ground plan of the book hasn't changed much over the last quarter of a century. It is a comprehensive account, historical, musicological, critical, under such headings as 'The Styles of Jazz', The Musicians of Jazz', 'The Elements of Jazz', 'The In- struments of Jazz', and so on. Much of it is frankly elementary; in his introduction Berendt invites you to skip what you know already. Subsections such as 'Melody', 'Harmony', 'Rhythm', tackle these topics valiantly, in an awareness that much of what they are trying to explain is inex- plicable. The whole resembles Hugues Panassie's seminal Hot Jazz in the Thirties, European, classificatory, opinionated, and Berendt might be thought of without too much injustice as a German Panassie. As an organiser of live and television jazz perfor- mances and recordings, he is involved with what he writes about; his subjects are not merely names on a record sleeve. This should, and at times does, give what he says a certain weight. The great difference between the two writers is that once Panassie had defined jazz, he expected it to stay that way. Later developments left him cold: his entry on Charlie Parker in his Dictionary of Jazz is shorter than that for Walter Page, for in- stance, and simply notes that he was an ex- tremely gifted musician who gave up jazz in favour of bop. Berendt, on the other hand, moves with the times: after Parker and Gillespie, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Coleman, and now John McLaughlin (these are 'The Musicians of Jazz'). Hence the nine revi- sions. At the same time, he is not a specially good writer. There is too much transla- tionese (`the lyrical sonority of Lester Young') and interminable lists of minor talents (`Narada Burton Greene, Dave Bur- rell, Bobby Few, Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Pullen' — yet his account of the alto saxophone omits Charlie Holmes, and of
the tenor Eddie Miller), and one is con- tinually breaking one's shins over how's-that-again statements such as 'Bix Beiderbecke is the essence of Chicago style'; 'one needs only to substitute for the names and concepts of Greek art and mythology Count Basie and Lester Young, swing, beat and blues'; 'the Eldridge of the clarinet is Edmond Hall' ; 'Gene Sedric might be called a black counterpart of Bud Freeman', and so on. Nine-tenths of jazz writing is bad, as Whitney Balliett said long ago; too much of Berendt is either pedes- trian or perfunctory. 'As a trumpeter,' he says of Bix, 'he was mainly a ja77 musician; at the piano he was rather more indebted to the European tradition.' Thanks indeed for that.
But these are small points. The interest of Berendt, and particularly this latest version, is seeing where his commitment to change in jazz leads him. 'The most impressive thing about jazz,' — aside from its musical value — is, in my opinion, its stylistic development;' he asserts in 1983 as hardily as in 1959, and this is true enough; jazz has gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in less than a century. This wonderfully ex- citing music, quickly freeing itself from its early formalities, flowered for perhaps three decades in a pulsing ecstasy that was recognised from Reykjavik to Rangoon. Then it split, as I have said before, into in- telligence without beat and beat without in telligence. The first was Bop, Cool, Hard Bop, Free Form (I am quoting Berendt's categories) — chromatic, atonal, everything one associates with modern music. The se- cond was rhythm-and-blues, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Top of the Pops, Radio One.
Now although Berendt sees this (and he could hardly ignore it) he doesn't mind it. `The blues,' he writes with satisfaction, `literally demolished the popular music of Tin Pan Alley'; goodbye to Berlin, as one might say, not to mention Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Fields and McHugh and the rest, who made the second quarter of the century a golden age of popular music that supplied jazz with so many of its vehicles while itself re- maining separate and delightful. And the other side is just 'development', something always greeted with vituperation by the outraged bourgeoisie (think of Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky), but really no more than a succession of stylistic beads on a long string reaching back to New Orleans. You thought Dizzy Gillespie awful, didnit you, he says amusedly; now he's 'as gay and familiar as "The Saints".' Albert Ayler `transplanted circus, country and marching music'; Coltrane and Coleman are both `solidly rooted in the blues tradition.' This is the party line. In reply I can say only that if Charlie Parker seems a less filthy racket today than he did in 1950, it is only because much filthier rackets have succeeded him. Translate that into French and you have Panassie's line too.
And so the fusion, the free-form, the jazz-rock of the Seventies and electronic Eighties will one day sound like Arm- strong's 'West End Blues'? I make that a question because ultimately Berendt's con- fidence seems to be starting to waver. True, he can still write sentences such as 'Jenkins uses the violin as a percussion instrument or noise producer' apparently without irony. But his five-point description of free jazz is starting to get home to him. I can't quote them all; the two most significant are 'A new rhythmic conception, characterised by the disintegration of meter, beat and sym- metry' and 'An extension of musical sound into the realm of noise', which as far as I am concerned is tantamount to saying that the product in question is no more jazz than it is marches or madrigals. And Berendt is beginning to see this. Admittedly he still de- nounces the 'bourgeois' concept of art as something that reassures (or `self-affirms'), and looks to 'free' jazz to break it up: 'the music does not follow the listener any more; the listener must follow the music unconditionally — wherever it may lead.' But at the end of the section on 'The Styles of Jazz' be suddenly comes clean: 'After twenty years of destroying clichés, all of a sudden we are realising that we are faced with — I don't want to say "nothing" but very little'. He takes his courage in both hands: 'Let me say something quite challenging. The jazz of the Eighties and Nineties will have to create new cliches . . it is almost always the cliché that brings out emotions.' And finally: 'He who is looking for, novelty can no longer find the old, the warm, the human.' Mr District Attorney, your witness. The tenth revision of Berendt may really be something.
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