Blue: The Murder Of Jazz [Paperback]

Eric Nisenson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2000

Once a thriving body of innovative and fluid music, jazz is now the victim of destructive professional and artistic forces, says Eric Nisenson. Corruption by marketers, appropriation by the mainstream, superficial media portrayal, and sheer lack of skill have all contributed to the demise of this venerable art form. Nisenson persuasively describes how the entire jazz ”industry” is controlled by a select cadre with a choke hold on the most vital components of the music. As the listening culture has changed, have spontaneity and improvisation been sacrificed? You can agree or disagree with Nisenson’s thesis and arguments, but as Booklist says, ”his passion is engrossing.”

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

According to some critics, jazz today is in a renaissance. Yet others take the view that jazz is dead, that today's young players are trapped in the past. These two books are on opposite sides of this raging debate. Relating the history of jazz to social forces, Nisenson (Ascension: Coltrane and His Quest, LJ 12/93) concludes that jazz is no longer created in its own time but is instead a dead art form. As a result, he attacks those he refers to as the "neo-classicists": Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, Wynton Marsalis, and Piazza himself. In his collection of previously published pieces, Piazza (The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz, LJ 3/1/95) takes the opposite tack, arguing that the concept of "jazz as emotion" is a fallacy and that jazz has regained what it had been missing in the years of jazz-rock fusion: technique, a feeling of swing, and knowledge of and respect for the tradition. (Sadly, another issue raised in both books is racism; there have been accusations that the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, under the auspices of Marsalis, has excluded white musicians.) The truth likely lies somewhere between the two poles presented here, and these two books are recommended jointly for effectively providing both sides of the argument.?Michael Colby, Univ. of California, Davis
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Nisenson (Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, 1993, etc.) adds another voice to the increasingly shrill debate on the future of jazz and the role of Wynton Marsalis and his friends in that future. Tom Piazza's Blues Up and Down (p. 1443) denounced critics who rejected the neoclassicism of the young musicians around Marsalis, hinting that those critics' emphasis on emotional statement and innovation had an unspoken racism underlying it. Nisenson has written a virtual manifesto for the opposing view. He jumps into the fray with both feet, accusing the ``revivalists,'' as he calls Marsalis and his coterie, of ``smothering the heart and soul of jazz with their love.'' He repeats the often-made accusations against Marsalis, his primary mouthpiece, Stanley Crouch, and their mentor Albert Murray, that there is implicit racism in their insistence that only African-Americans can truly play jazz, that jazz has its roots exclusively in the African-American experience. He also repeats the claim that Marsalis's hiring practices at Lincoln Center, where he directs the jazz program, have been both racist (few white musicians hired, only one--Gerry Mulligan--feted) and ageist. Then he offers a canned history of the music, designed to provide evidence for his own understanding of jazz a view that is no less essentialist and no less limited than the one he assails. The basic problem with this book, indeed, with this entire debate, is that nobody is offering a definition of jazz, based solely on musical analysis. Rather, as in Nisenson's book, what we are getting is a potted mix of half-understood sociology, half-digested musicology, and half-baked mythology. Nisenson compounds the felony with a writing style that is drenched in clich‚s. Will someone please step back from this fight and offer a dispassionate assessment of the state of jazz, the history of jazz, and the future of jazz? This book certainly isn't it. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (January 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306809257
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809255
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This polemic will make the jazz establishment sweat!, June 2, 2000

By 

joel fass - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue: The Murder Of Jazz (Paperback)

Musicians like myself are frequently amused by polemic like these. In the first place, most workaday (but in many cases, top-drawer) jazz players I know probably couldn't even afford admission into Lincoln Center to hear what all the shootin' is about, a fact that in itself speaks volumes about how little has changed in the BUSINESS of music and how its establishment totally disrespects its practitioners.

Having said that, I think Nisenson had a hell of a lot of courage to "tilt at windbags" and go after the high and mighty the way he did. Personally, for what it's worth, I happen to agree with his assessment of things. If he were a musician worrying about career, etc., the smart money would say to keep his mouth shut. There is currently a surfeit of gifted musicians across the stylistic spectrum that can only be termed "disenfranchised", for many of the reasons Nisenson alludes to (eg.: ageism, commercialism, Crow-Jim, control of the industry by the few, critics falling in line with the "sainted one" and his minions the better to advance their own phoney-baloney careers, etc.). Nisenson cuts through this malarkey to expose this. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his assertions, he deserves credit for his courage and for "afflicting the comfortable". He raises issues that need raising. Perhaps after reading this, musicians will finally realize that there is strength in unity AND diversity, and that we are all on the same side in the pursuit of our individual visions of beauty.

31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Piazza and Nisenson: architects of "straw men" and "essence", June 24, 1999

By 

Frank S. Cohen "[e-mail]" (Leominster, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blue: The Murder of Jazz (Hardcover)

An irritating book. The argument is easily dismantled once someone picks up Nisenson's strategy. He speaks of the "spirit" of jazz and its constant violation by the "neoclassicists" who obsess with eliminating what Nisenson identifies is that spirit. I don't leave convinced that Nisenson has captured "the" spirit and "the taming" of that spirit.

Tom Piazza's book sends a message that is the complete inverse of Nisenson's. The neoclassicists are the vanguard for the "sprit" of jazz.

Both books are so fundamentalist, emotional and subjective in their perspectives that neither will change the mindset of anyone who has or has not chosen sides in these "jazz wars."

Sometimes I wonder if the bulk of jazz musicians really believe they are in a war or if the war is something that exists in the minds of critics and fans. It's hard to tell since Piazza and Nisenson seem uninterested in conversing with what they see as the fundamentally heretical opposition.

Piazza's book is worse because he doesn't attempt doesn't even attempt to structure his thoughts into the form of a coherent argument. Nisenson, at least, is more thoughtfully committed to providing the reader a completed work, which is a polemical work. That's not a problem in itself. However, it is so polemical and so obsessed with the social influences, personalities, words, and "anti-jazz" spirit of neoclassicism that he doesn't bother analyzing actual specific pieces of music that they make. He just keeps claiming that "neoclassicists" lack what "Miles called 'that thing." He tries to define "that thing" throughout most of the book by examining the jazz eras for their "innovative" and "reactionary" elements.

However, the book is thoroughly unconvincing because NOT ONE, NOT ONE, piece of music by the "neoclassicists" is analyzed for content. It's just all "anti-innovation," disembodied from "social environment," dispassionate, and cold. He simply categorizes a huge body of work as being anti-jazz neoclassicism. I find Nisenson to be as reactionary as the "straw man" he is criticizing or, should I say, condemning to hell.

Nisenson and Piazza are fundamentalists convinced that they have perfect conceptions of the essence of jazz. They create straw men but Nisenson is far less lazy in crafting his staw man and developing his conception of jazz's essence. Piazza just expects to do no work and have everyone buy into his argument.

Nisenson's book is overly repetitive, too whiny, and too detached from the creation of those he despises. I REPEAT: NOT ONE, NOT ONE, NOT ONE RECORDING BY the so-called "neoclassicists" is analyzed for content. Books like this don't have to be written by the most scholarly of music critics. I just want to see an attempt to get at the content of the real rather than the hypothetical music of those that jazz writers identify as being in the destructive opposition.

I warn readers of books like this. Please be careful of these lines drawn in the battlefield and the labels/categories assigned in the heat of battle. Listen to music carefully, reflect on it, record your own responses and feelings on its content. Be very skeptical when writers avoid the actual content of the music they are criticizing. Piazza and Nisenson are amateur social scientists/philosophers making an artform of overstatement about musical trends they refuse to examine for musical content.

They both know a lot about music but they both obsess and speculate so much on the social motivations of their perceived opposition that they willfuly neglect an examination of the actual music created by that opposition.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Historians don't MAKE history, they just STUDY those who do, May 23, 1999

By 

"[e-mail]" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue: The Murder of Jazz (Hardcover)

Musician and author, Bill Cole writes in his biography of John Coltrane, "In music the course has been to investigate the structural manifestations of jazz and put importance on THAT far exceeding its worth and to call THAT scholarship. 'In structural [mode analysis], where form is held to determine content, its value is inflated beyond all reason, with the result that an analysis of how a thing is shaped or done is virtually now regarded as supplying the key to the essence of its being...'" (page 51) This consideration becomes particularly relevant in regards to the arguments presented by Nisenson in this book. Nisenson concentrates his attention on the work of Wynton Marsalis and those who reside under his banner at Lincoln Center, reprimanding the Wyntonians on many levels. For one, jazz has ALWAYS been the idiom of pioneers: Satch, Hawk, Duke, Dexter Gordon, Monk, Bird, Dizzy, Miles, 'Trane and many others who defied the conventions of their time (which was not often favored by the press.) It has ALWAYS been essential of any significant player to have a style of one's own. When the author consider's Wynton's musicianship in this regard, Mr. Marsalis seems to fall short. This is not meant to imply that Mr. Marsalis lacks overall ability. Marsalis DOES know how to play the trumpet well. His proficiency, however, never transcends technical understanding of forensic "correctness." As a player he aspires for historical accuracy (according to what he and his PURPORT to be "The Jazz Tradition") rather than dauntless individuality which is its own tradition. As a player, Wynton sounds like everyone who preceeded him. The real tragedy of this is that he is lauded for it. Another reprisal posed by Nisenson is of the hubristic position taken by the neo-classicists in that they feel entitled to imperiously ordain to the jazz community what is and is not "authentic." You don't have to be a genius to understand why no single criterion can define a music so diverse... esspecially when the principles are so stringently ultra-conservative. Nisenson takes a detailed inventory of the narrow parameters by which the neo-classicists appraise the value of an individual's work and then spends the majority of the book applying these standards to each generation in jazz's genealogy. The revelation of this is that when this dogma is applied, too many musicians central to the jazz tradition are discounted. One other issue addressed is the overall politics surrounding the situation at Lincoln Center. Nisenson makes an astute observation that the musicians seem to be following the critics which certainly IS NOT indigenous to the jazz tradition and is certainly to the detriment of ANY art form. Another observation is that Jazz At Lincoln Center seems to have hiring policies and programing that tend to exclude white musicians. When the classical establishment was accused of the same practices it was considered not only racist, but unacceptable. It is hard to imagine calling it by any other name when the circumstances are reversed. There is also something to be said for the quality of performances that take place under the leadership of Mr. Marsalis. The itenerary seems less about educating the public about the merits of jazz as it does to finance Wynton's fleet of groups who churn out rather watered-down, logically "safe", risk-free interpretations of music that was once compelling for being none of the above. I gave this book three stars because someone NEEDED to write this book. Nisenson is not an outstanding writer by any stretch of the imagination. There are times when I felt as though he presumed too much and did not explain enough, but for the most part he presents his accumen with efficiency and takes his time to present us with the evidence. As Leroi Jones said in his book "Black Music", "A bad solo, no matter how well it is played, is still a bad solo." I would contend in defense of this book with the following - A valid point, regardless of how poorly stated, is still a valid point. Nisenson pleads exuberantly, if not elloquently, for an art form that teeters perilously on the verge of extinction at the hands of its' paper heros.