Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition And Innovation [Paperback]

Gary Giddins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2000

In a companion to his collections Riding on a Blue Note and Faces in the Crowd, Gary Giddins has assembled a mosaic of pieces that provide an essential guide to the jazz world. Moving with ease from sweeping surveys of jazz history to precise, vivid assessments of individual performers including Thelonius Monk, the Marsalis brothers, Ornette Coleman, and David Murray, Giddins demonstrates once again why he is lauded as "the best jazz critic now at work" (Newsweek).

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An indispensable guidebook." -- Francis Davis, New York Times

"The jazz book of the year." -- Ken Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer

"[A] brilliant collection....With refreshing insight, wit, and a readable style much too rare in his field, Giddins has assembled delightful and instructive pieces that can be returned to again and again." -- Grover Sales, Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Gary Giddins is a columnist for the Village Voice and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Visions of Jazz. He is also the author of a biography of Bing Crosby. His work has won numerous prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, five ASCAP-Deems Taylor awards, and an American Book Award. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (September 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306809877
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809873
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,039,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

GARY GIDDINS is a long-time columnist for the Village Voice and a preeminent jazz critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams--The Early Years, 1903-1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars giddins champions eclecticism in jazz, March 21, 2001

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R. Hutchinson "autonomeus" (a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition And Innovation (Paperback)

DaCapo does it again, bringing back into print the best jazz criticism. I read this collection of Giddins' Village Voice essays a couple of years after it was first published by Oxford in 1985. The picture of jazz it captures from the early '80s is, for better or worse, not so different from the picture today. No revolutions, just an ongoing period of recombinations and the uneasy coexistence of various styles.

Giddins is catholic in his enthusiasms, but I was and continue to be more interested in the avant-garde. In addition to swing and bop players (including Monk, from whom he took his title), here are some of the players he writes about, mainly their recordings, but also some concerts -- Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, James DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, the William Breuker Kollektief, and Alexander von Schlippenbach's Global Unity Orchestra.

He concludes a review of the "Young Lions" performance, including the 21-year-old Wynton Marsalis, at the 1982 Kool Jazz Festival in NYC with these prophetic lines: "My intuition tells me that innovation isn't this generation's fate...the neoclassicists have a task no less valuable than innovation: sustenance. [M]usicians such as Marsalis are needed to restore order, replenish melody, revitalize the beat, loot the tradition for whatever works, and expand the audience. That way we'll be all the hungrier for the next incursion of genuine avant-gardists..." (161) Of course "this generation" cannot be reduced to the neoclassical revivalists, but to the extent that they have dominated the jazz world since the mid-'80s, Giddins had it right "on the money," in every sense of the word.

That tendency has now persisted long past the time it was (arguably) making a needed contribution. Contrary to Marsalis, the living soul of jazz is creative improvisation, not ossified composition! As of 2005, jazz is still in need of rejuvenation. Having a jazz museum at the Lincoln Center is fine, but jazz can only be kept alive outside of museums through constant innovation.