Customer Reviews

Blues Up and Down

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The only reason this gets 2 instead of 1 star is the one chapter that provides a well-supported critique (for an essay) of Collier's Ellington biography. That is the only part of the whole book worth reading and it is the only part exempt from the critique to follow.

The chapters are previously pubished essays that simply don't cohere and make up an aimless scheme of a book. The aim, purportedly, is to provide Piazza's conception of jazz's essence. The book is one big outline of a project for multiple books. Each chapter can be a basis for a stimulating book. I just think that Piazza doesn't feel like writing one so this is what you get.

The essays meander and drag on either because they are too offhand in delivery; too uncharitable towards their targets of critique (with occasional, strategic, contrived, and, based on my impression, disingenuous, bows to diplomacy); and too disparate to achieve the goal Piazza sets out in the introduction.

Also, I think I'm sick of the debate over Marsalis due to its shallowness and callousness. Regardless, this book is a reader's waste of time, energy, and money. I think Piazza is capable of writing a good book but he simply lacked the initiative to write one that is both well conceived and well executed