Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time [Hardcover]

Tom Piazza (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1997

A tour-de-force mixture of reportage, criticism and essay, Blues Up And Down takes exhilarating aim at those who proclaimed jazz dead in the 1980s, and offers a series of provocative, bold, and original arguments for jazz's continued health.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

From Kirkus Reviews

Piazza, whose short-story collection Blues and Trouble (1996) won the Michener Prize, looks again at his favorite music in this collection of occasional pieces. Writing on jazz between 1979 and 1997 (for which he won the 1996 ASCAPDeems Taylor Award for Music Writing), Piazza has had the opportunity to watch this musical phoenix arise once again resplendent from its supposed ashes. In the course of the two decades covered by the pieces in this volume (most of them previously published in the New York Times, the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and the Village Voice), Piazza has recounted the arrival of a new generation of young jazz musicians, headed by the controversial Wynton Marsalis. The author has been one of the more forceful advocates for Marsalis and his acolytes and their brand of neoclassical jazz. Briefly, Piazza believes that the critics who decry Marsalis's lack of ``emotion'' are unwittingly and tacitly racist, reducing all jazz to a sort of primitive expression of raw feeling and undervaluing the role of intellect in the creation of the music. It's an argument that's not without some merit, as his lengthy attacks on James Lincoln Collier (particularly a scathing review of Collier's egregious Duke Ellington biography) show. But too many of the pieces here--the opening reviews of McCoy Tyner and Mary Lou Williams in particular--have little or nothing to do with this thesis. The best essays are reportage from the road, a previously unpublished piece on a jazz festival in Dahomey and a recounting of days and nights on tour with Wynton and his band. Piazza is a writer worth paying attention to, but this book is too slight a framework to support his arguments. In fact, it is too slight a framework to call a book. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 194 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st edition (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031216789X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312167899
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,443,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tom Piazza is the author of ten books, the most recent of which is "Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America," a collection of essays and journalism on music, literature and politics.

His other books include the novel "City Of Refuge," which won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and the post-Katrina classic "Why New Orleans Matters." His novel "My Cold War" won the Faulkner Society Award for the Novel, and his short-story collection "Blues and Trouble," won the James Michener Award for Fiction. He is currently a writer for the HBO series "Treme" and is at work on a new novel.

No less a literary critic than Bob Dylan has said, "Tom Piazza's writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension - reveals the emotions that we can't define." A well known writer on American music as well, Tom won a Grammy Award for his album notes to "Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey" and is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he lives in New Orleans.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars an irrelevant book more akin to the ugly PCs of Rush Limbaug, November 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Blues Up and Down (Paperback)

and perhaps with the same ears. to wit...
Mr Piazza thinks that avant garde music is primitive, not sophisticated. He needs his ears examined.

Even more ugly is the PC he brings to his discourse. To Mr Piazza, to like fusion and avant garde is to be a racist.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read, July 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time (Hardcover)

If you want to know more about the state of jazz in the nineties, this book is a MUST READ!!! Incredible well-written and thoughtful.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Politics over music, January 18, 2011

By 

Sal D'Agostino "stereo72" (Hoboken, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blues Up and Down (Paperback)

I really don't care much about arguments over what jazz is or isn't. Music, to me, is music, and if somebody wants to say the music I like isn't jazz, then he can go ahead. But when a white jazz pianist (the author) implies that true jazz can be played only by blacks or hispanics, or may contain elements only of black or hispanic music, then I have to join the fray. The very fact that so many black jazz leaders hire, on a regular basis, so many white players for their tours and albums is proof to me that we honkies can indeed play some jazz. I mean, who knows more about jazz, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, or Tom Piazza? This "book" sounds like it came from the Wynton Marsalis Public Relations Department. I especially like the essay on why Piazza dislikes McCoy Tyner to throw us off the scent. This is pure racism. Very well-written racism, too, which makes it all the more dangerous. Have you ever noticed that whenever they want to make a white character in a movie look hip (Hi Fidelity, Blues Brothers, et al), they have him playing records by black artists? That's Piazza. I'll also bet he's a basketball fan who can't jump.