Customer Reviews

Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers

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Regardless of your familiarity with jazz history, its people or its forms, this collection of essays is great for the fan or the first time listener interested in learning more. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, and Lester Young get scholarly appreciations, but so do Sun Ra, Henry Threadgill, Steve Lacy, and -- really showing the author's capacity for inclusiveness -- Bobby Darin, which isn't as farfetched as it seems. Essays are grouped into composers, instrumentalists, and vocalists, with a fourth section devoted to historical essays, encouraging the interested reader to explore more of a particular style. Davis assumes the reader will know a little about jazz, but his enthusiasm for his subject matter makes this book lively reading about America's most original musical form.

This pungent little collection has more insights per page than most volumes four times its size. Francis Davis doesn't waste time trying to prove how hip he is, and although very well informed he doesn't come across as a jazz clinician or bellicose educator. He is always the keen observer, the nuanced listener, and at times is able to express his sheer enjoyment of the art form with the kind of warmth and immediacy that Ralph J. Gleason used to muster.
If he reminds me of anyone it is James Agee; he possesses that writer's concision, dry humor, and profound belief in his subject as an art form. His prose doesn't draw attention to itself but it curls up in the ear. Words choices are deft and his thought takes interesting turns. His piece on Sheila Jordan is worth the price of admission and underscores the humanity that inhabits this collection.