In 146 lively essays, articles and reviews, most of them written for his Weather Bird column in the Village Voice, critic Giddins surveys the jazz scene from 1990 to 2003. He covers concerts, recordings and jazz festivals, and considers new artists as well as older singers and instrumentalists (e.g., Doc Cheatham, Rosemary Clooney, Benny Carter) and those long gone but brought to life on reissued recordings (e.g., Billie Holiday, the Boswell sisters and especially Louis Armstrong, whose seminal place in jazz is underscored by the book’s title, which comes from the famous Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines duet). Designed to be a companion volume to Giddins’s landmark reference, Visions of Jazz, the volume offers an overview of jazz’s avant-garde and discussions of dozens of familiar contemporary artists and relative newcomers, such as pianists Bill Charlap and Jason Moran. Giddins pays tribute to two deceased critics, Martin Williams and Leonard Feather, and praises engineer Robert Parker for his pioneering work in recovering the best sound from remastered 78s. As a reviewer, Giddins is opinionated but generous, with the laudable ability to capture the essence of a performer’s style in vibrant language that makes the music described seem almost audible. In a final essay, he outlines the history of jazz and shows that, contrary to some opinions, the form is very much alive.
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"Giddins has been recognized as the Duke, the Count, the Earl of jazz writers.... No one puts it together like Giddins, whose writing is an unmatched combination of big ideas, witty wordsmithery, historical insight, and musicological know-how.... Thumbing through 'Weather Bird' is like listening to some of your old favorites--and being astonished as you still hear new things.... Giddins has set the bar for jazz scholarship so high no one is likely to top it.... His jazz column was a thing to be treasured--as is this collection."--Will Friedwald, New York Sun
"The breadth and depth of Giddins's knowledge is extremely impressive, his ear is astounding, and his masterly style routinely achieves the near impossible in writing engagingly about something that inherently eludes description.... The book stands on its own, but taken with Giddins's acclaimed Visions of Jazz: The First Century, it affords the reader a highly accessible, personal, and perceptive portrait of the development of jazz and its towering figures (and some lesser-known but significant talents), from its beginnings to the present."--Library Journal
"There is an indescribable joy in finding writers who not only know how to cleverly turn a phrase, but who truly understand how to imbue their writing with personality, life and a personal perspective that makes a reader want to keep coming back for more. Jazz writer Gary Giddins is such writer.... From Louis Armstrong to The Bad Plus, from Dave Holland to Dave Douglas, from Sonny Rollins to David S. Ware and Charlie Christian to Charles Mingus, Weather Bird is about as comprehensive a critical look at jazz as one can find in 600 pages."--John Kelman, allaboutjazz.com
"A hefty but absorbing collection of the ex-Village Voice critic's recent jazz criticism. As a dilettante jazz listener, I learned something from every paragraph."--Alex Ross, therestisnoise.com
"Giddins has probably become the standard by which all other jazz writers and critics have to be judged.... The second volume of Giddins' extraordinary work confirms fully that he was probably the greatest regularly appearing working critic of the music in its history."--The Buffalo News
"Giddins is opinionated but generous, with the laudable ability to capture the essence of a performer's style in vibrant language that makes the music described seem almost audible."--Publishers Weekly
"When it comes to selling the music he loves, he's a gifted evangelist. That's no small thing."--JazzTimes
"Giddins has a voice. It's full of bold assertions and blunt putdowns. He loves the music to death--that feeling oozes through these 600-plus pages, though Giddins balances emotion with intellect, as does jazz itself. He's a scholarly fanatic, obsessing on the music endlessly, at times comically, fusing a school kid's ebullience to dissertation-like detail. He seems to work as hard at understanding the music as musicians do at mastering jazz's labyrinthine systems."--San Jose Mercury News
"Giddins' insights are so compelling and his writing so crisp that matters like past, present and future become moot.... Like so many of the virtuosos he writes about, Giddins has an explosive way of expressing ideas, sometimes complex ones."--David Rubien, San Francisco Chronicle
"Giddins can be read for the sheer pleasure of watching him surround music with language. He's passionate and erudite, a marvelous historian, and always a splendid companion -- an essayist in the disguise of a critic." --Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn
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