Why I Became a Jazz Journalist and Critic: A Book Essay Excerpt
Credit: Martin Johnson, Greg Thomas, and Hollie West, "Newspaper Writers and Columnists," in Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Stories, ed. Willard Jenkins, pp. 167-187. Copyright 2022, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. By permission of the publisher.
Last December, Duke University Press published Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story, edited by Willard Jenkins. The following excerpt from the book was originally written over a decade ago. In addition to sharing how I immersed myself in the music and eventually became a jazz writer, I directly confront the issue of race, culture, and their implications for editorial coverage of the music. If I were writing it today, my use of racial language would be more precise, but I’m leaving it as found in the published text. Apropos of this month being Jazz Appreciation Month, I hope you enjoy my critical perspective on the pluralistic power of jazz, as well as the social and cultural politics of the art form in the United States.
A tribute to the late, great Ahmad Jamal directly follows.
My motivation to write about music came from home. The foundation was the music my parents listened to, which included jazz, and my deep study and enjoyment of the giants of jazz that I’d been listening to very intently since high school. Inspired by a high school stage band concert, I began to play the alto saxophone at fifteen years old. I took lessons from the Staten Island sax legend Caesar DiMauro, studied music theory and saxophone method books, played in various classical and jazz ensembles, tuned in regularly to jazz radio, first WRVR and then WBGO, and minored in music at Hamilton College, where I also hosted a jazz radio show for three years. During a concert with the Hamilton College Big Band featuring Clark Terry, on April 17, 1984, I shared a melody line with the brass instrument icon. It was an epiphany, a mystical experience of musical ecstasy!
A few years after graduating from Hamilton College, I met Keith Clinkscales and Leonard Burnett—later of Vibe and Savoy magazines—who launched their first publication, Urban Profile, in the late 1980s. I was more troubled, frankly, by how relatively few black folks attended live jazz performances than I was by the dearth of black writers covering jazz. So Keith and Len published my very first professional piece dealing with that burning issue, titled, “Why Black Folks Should Listen to Jazz.” A few years later I became a staff writer for the Afro-American community news–focused, Brooklyn-based City Sun, writing about jazz and other subjects. Since then, I’ve freelanced for a variety of publications, and have written frequently about jazz music.
I still believe that not only black folks should listen to and appreciate jazz—everyone should. Yet black Americans are the creators and innovators of the jazz idiom, one of the most powerful art forms we have created. Ancestral pride and recognition of historical value are reasons enough, but today I propose that black folk in particular check out jazz, not because of nostalgia but because it can point to answers about the puzzles of personal and cultural identity in a postmodern age.
George Lewis on trombone
Jazz can lead those curious enough to some of the greatest music ever made. Not only that, the music will point to ingenious writers and thinkers who’ve addressed the music, such as Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and George Lewis, who is also a composer, trombonist, and creator of a software program that improvises with human beings. Stephon Alexander wrote a book called The Jazz of Physics in which he relates the music and John Coltrane’s search to cutting-edge physics, at both small-scale quantum and universe-scale cosmological levels.
If black folks really want a source of affirmation despite a history of injustice, and in the face of the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology, and to understand themselves in cultural and cosmic terms, jazz is here, patient, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come back home.
As far as the number of black writers covering the music, it wasn’t as bad when I started reading about jazz as it seems to me now, when there are even fewer black writers at mainstream outlets covering jazz. Back when I started writing about the music, I’d read pieces on jazz by Stanley Crouch and Greg Tate in the Village Voice, Gene Seymour in the Nation and New York Newsday, and jazz writings by the Harlemite Herb Boyd and a contemporary of mine, Eugene Holley Jr., in various publications. All of these guys were in New York in my early years as a writer, as were the elder grand masters, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.
These days there are fewer print outlets than ever covering jazz. The few that do consider jazz worthy of coverage hardly have any writers of color. Martin Johnson, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, was an exception, but even he doesn’t write about jazz for the WSJ with the frequency of some of their “white” contributors, like Will Friedwald and Marc Myers.
I suppose that most black commentators who focus on music generally deal with more popular genres because pop music is more likely to have a larger audience and readership, and therefore publications willing to pay for their writing. There are fewer and fewer publications that even cover “serious music” anymore.
With respect to the auspicious African American history of jazz, the glaring disparity has to do with black musicians being acculturated early on to the cultural power and appeal of jazz expression, particularly since their ancestors founded and innovated the blues idiom vernacular called jazz—versus black media commentators who privilege popular music forms (and the career benefits that coverage might bring) over jazz, a fine art they may not even like or feel qualified to write about.
Pop and youth culture hold a powerful sway, whereas you have to go deep in the woodshed to write about jazz with substance. Most black commentators, even those in the academy, apparently are not ready, willing, or able to go that deep in the shed about this musical form at the very pinnacle of their culture.
In terms of the black intelligentsia’s and academics’ seeming ignorance of jazz, with some noble and notable exceptions, the neglect of jazz by black intellectuals has been the case throughout the entire history of the music. So-called black public intellectuals feel more comfortable discussing hip-hop for reasons similar to those I suggested earlier about black journalists. Some of this is generational, since jazz’s popularity in the United States dates back to at least the mid-twentieth century. Some black public intellectuals are fine with making passing references to jazz in their rhetoric (i.e., Cornel West), because of the deep structural value of jazz in both American culture writ large and in black American culture. But such references are superficial and a disservice to folks who read their work and hear their speeches. If they would go deeper, perhaps more black folks would be willing to pursue listening to and learning about the jazz idiom themselves. But on the other hand, perhaps writing about the fine arts, about “serious music,” considering our difficult history in this land, has aptly been viewed as a luxury until more recent times.
Ultimately, such lack of diversity among those who write about jazz contributes to how the music is covered. But I think we can only take that point so far. Most writers covering jazz readily acknowledge the black American roots of the music, so that’s a commonality. But there are different viewpoints on the value of certain styles or subgenres, and as a result different emphases arise based on stylistic preferences. I don’t think there is an underlying racial motivation in those different views. These and other motivating factors play a role in how the music is covered just as much as or more than race considerations.
As in politics, where race doesn’t necessarily determine whether one is liberal or conservative, Black American writers don’t share the same opinions about the music based solely on their cultural identification. Neither is this the case with white writers. Some black writers appreciate and write about what’s called “mainstream” blues and swinging jazz, while others prefer the offshoots of what in the 1960s was called “free” (or avant-garde) jazz. These are questions of taste, not race. Also, white writers and others who don’t identify as “black” still share in the values and expressive content of black American culture by a sort of cultural osmosis, because that blues idiom is in the very fabric of American society and culture writ large. If you consider yourself American, you’re part black too!
I have at times questioned why some musicians may be elevated over others in the coverage of jazz. And though the backstory is usually more complicated than a simple “race” analysis, race being an ever-present cancer in the body politic does play a role in which musicians get elevated over others. Some white jazz artists still have more market value than black jazz artists on the same instrument who are just as talented. But in the marketplace, many factors tie into why various artists are paid at a certain level versus others. Race factors in, but not as prominently as it did in the first decades of jazz’s development.
It’s important to note that race and cultural diversity are actually two different things—the confusion between race and culture has been deadly—but I think it better to confront race in jazz so that we might better move beyond such considerations. The concept of race is ultimately trivial and stupid, but to transcend race we must face the illusion/delusion of race squarely.
Honoring Ahmad Jamal
Yesterday, a grandmaster of America’s classical music joined the ancestors: Ahmad Jamal. For me, Jamal’s impeccable taste and exquisite touch and technique on piano is only matched by his grand orchestral conception and small group arranging prowess, which transformed the styling of the jazz trio to such an extent that Miles Davis incorporated aspects of Jamal’s approach into his classic quintets in the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.
I commend to you Martin Johnson’s excellent feature obituary, published on NPR’s website. The apposite measure of the man’s impact and influence as a stylist and improviser for the past 70 years is well rendered with nuanced description and quotes from pianists Vijay Iyer, Ben Waltzer, and Matthew Shipp. Check out the musical cuts Johnson chose, as they are classics in the Ahmad Jamal oeuvre.
I suggest the following two cuts: first, “Darn that Dream,” where his ensemble performs on video with other masters surrounding the trio, a ritual circle of support and challenge. This is a song that for many years I’ve shared in classes as a classic example of the feel of the jazz idiom.
Second, Natalie Cole’s “La Costa,” whose dreamy original version from 1977 was reinterpreted by Jamal in his own billowy way in 1980 and again in 1985. To bask in the 1985 version from his recording Digital Works, click the album cover image.
