JUNE News 2005 Review by Walter Horn

Larry Kart
JAZZ IN SEARCH OF ITSELF
Yale University Press
ISBN 0-30010-420-0 2004
I have to admit that reading the introduction to Larry Karts new
anthology of jazz reviews, interviews and essays only added to
the prior apprehension I had about the book, a mood induced by
the title of the work. Certainly the ponderousness of the idea of a
particular art subspecies looking hither and yon for itself wasnt
dampened by the introduction, with its opaque quotations from
Ortega y Gasset and various proclamations to the effect that jazz
is a meaning-making activity; its acts ask to be read, and have
even come to be at various times and places hungered for.
Thinking of my duty to read the tome, I once, calling upon Isiah
Berlin, even issued a silent prayer. Please, I petitioned, even if
Kart is no hedgehog (knowing one big thing) let him at least be a
fox (who knows many littleperhaps occasionally interesting things)!
I neednt have worried. Jazz in Search of Itself is not only interesting and fun to
read, its perceptive, thoughtful, and evenhanded. Best of all, its chock full of
careful dissections of age-old puzzles. Kart, who has worked for both the Chicago
Tribune and Downbeat, is a sympathetic interviewer and critic, but no pushover:
hes willing to point out failings even in his biggest heroes. The ellipticality of
Wayne Shorter and what might be called the rhythm-centricity of Warne Marsh are
two examples of shortcomings he finds in a couple of his avowed gods. He can
admit when he may have overstated a bit, too: both a 1978 overly-psychologistic
piece on Cecil Taylor and a 1983 critique of Bill Evans, in which Kart basically
accuses the pianist of the occasional manufacture of pure treacle, were subjected
to recent reassessment. His deepest preferences seem to be for saxophonists and
singers, with the most fervent tributes directed toward Lee Konitz, Ornette
Coleman, Shorter, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. But Kart also has ample
sympathy and understanding for composers, pianists, and trumpeters. Several of
his pieces lovingly describe how he got the bug himself, telling of his youthful
encounters with the new music in his hometown Chicago; others, like his review of
Count Basies autobiography, Good Morning Blues, are moving and elegant.

To his credit, Kart is not embarrassed by his descriptions of being blown away at
some of the many gigs hes attendedwhether or not the player doing the blowing
is currently supposed to be a top-notch artist. For example, in a 1982 piece on
Oscar Peterson, he tells us that Overdrive [is the pianists] most effective
gear.[H]is music begins to make sense only when he wheels his screeching
keyboard right to the edge of a cliff. But unlike many contemporary heavy-
breathers on the music-writing scene, several of Karts essays provide
considerable evidence of a depth of understanding of music's complexities. His
careful discussion of the similarities and differences between Lennie Tristano and
Bach is a case in point, and certainly one can tell how hard he has thought about
the issues surrounding Tristanos use of tape manipulation on some of the
pianists recordings:
"The process whereby Tristano speeded up the tapes of his piano playing on Line
Up and East Thirty-Second to match the prerecorded (and also fiddled with)
bass and drum work of Peter Ind and Jeff Morton inspired a fair amount of
controversy at the time, and while it died away when C Minor Complex made
clear again what ought to have been obvious from the firstthat Tristano could
execute at the speed of [those tunes] without electronic assistanceperhaps his
justification for what he did (the result sounded good to me) ought be taken
literally. That is, by recording bass-register piano lines and speeding up the tapes
until the pitch of the piano lines was raised on octave, Tristano not only made the
lines move faster, but he also made a new sound. The lower in register a note on
the piano is, the more slowly it speaks and the less rapidly it decays. By forcing
that effect upwards, Tristano altered the attack-decay relationship of each note
adding a tremendously propulsive, Chu Berry-like buzz or whoosh to tones that
couldnt possibly have had that effect, that sound, if they actually had been played
in the pianos middle register."

As illuminating and riveting as many of his one-off pieces are, however, the
centerpiece of his Jazz in Search of Itself is constituted by the seven related
pieces that make up the section of the book Kart calls The Neo Con Game. Here,
the author delves deeply into some of the thorniest questions in the history of
music criticism. Perhaps I can rephrase them this way: What is (or would be)
wrong with somebody writing (or playing) music like Mozarts (or Miles Daviss)
today? If the composer/performer is highly skilled and the original forms have
intrinsic value, mustnt the latter-day replicas also be valuable? Why should
Stravinskys or Hindemiths neo-classicism be considered a step forward if
indeed it should while the Wynton/Branford Marsalis approach to jazz over the
past 20 years is derided as little more than a sort of facile mimicry?" While I can
hardly do justice to Karts extremely discerning commentary in a review, I think it
will be illustrative to provide a couple of excerpts. Before doing so, however, I
want to point out that Karts critique of the neo-cons is far less polemical than it
could be. His earliest piece on Wynton, Marsalis at Twenty-One [1983] is
sympathetic and hopefulKart obviously believes that the trumpeters astonishing
gifts might, over time, result in a jazz titan. Kart cant be criticized for being a
partisan avant-gardist, in any case. While an avid admirer of Colemans harmonic
advances, Evan Parkers circular-breathing chops, and Roscoe Mitchells affinities
with the fifteenth-century contrapuntalist Guillaume Dufay (!), Kart clearly prefers
Konitz and Stan Getz to Cecil Taylor, and never even mentions Sun Ra, Anthony
Braxton, or Derek Bailey in the book. In fact, though he devotes an essay to Frank
Zappa, a piece on prosody makes it abundantly clear that Kart has much more
affinity for Cole Porter than for either Lennon or Dylan. Each page of the book
reestablishes how deep the authors roots are in swing and bop. However, as the
Marsalises fame and influence increase over time, one can almost see Kart
shaking his head in discouragement. Branford, he says, seems to be playing at
jazz instead of just playing itas though his involvement with the music were
based on a paradoxical need to fend off its emotional demands. Again, he chides,
What Coltrane left behind was not a hip style, but a drive toward ecstatic
transcendence. And, by the mid-eighties, Kart is willing to judge that the effect
of [Wyntons] music is oddly and disappointingly bland. He concludes that there
would seem to be something illusory in the hope that solid ground can be found in
the jazz styles of the mid-1960s (particularly the music of the Miles Davis
Quintet)which is where most of todays would-be neoclassicists plant their
flagsfor that music was always unstable, an art of emotional and technical
brinkmanship. Kart is nearly as hard on David Murray, of whom he says that the
turn towards orthodoxy after experimental early work seems a sign of conscious
guile, an eagerness to gratify his and his audiences desires to experience in the
present a way of playing jazz that a short while ago seemed to belong only to the
past. The final nail in the neo-con coffin comes in a contemporary summing-up in
which Wynton Marsalis is made to be nothing so much as a modern-day Paul
Whiteman, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles
they filled....the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini [and]
Marsalis, the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and
foe of rap and hip-hop. Its a devastating critique.
Kart devotes one graceful piece to Jack Kerouacs relationship to jazzhis use of it
both as subject matter and as inspiration for prose style. Unsurprisingly, the essay
is as fertile as those on the musicians Kart discusses:
"[I]t is the sound of men like [Brew] Moore and [Allen] Eager, not the heated
brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he
managed to capture....These are men! wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk
Johnsons band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said
that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter or Thelonious Monk.
But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Mooreand in
the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that mattera sense of
loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an
essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew
that it was an essential part of his story too."

To conclude, Jazz in Search of Itself is a very satisfying book. Although most of the
pieces are shortnone more than three or four pagesnot a single one is without
some valuable kernel that can be reflected on at length. How is it possible to pack
so much thought and feeling into these little essays? Well, its a bit like Arnett
Cobbs solo on Just a Closer Walk With Thee. As Kart explains, Cobb "began a
chorus with a seemingly simple two-note phrase, which might be rendered
onomatopoetically as Yah-duh. Now I suppose you had to be there to hear what
that Yah-duh did, but let me assure you that within its apparent simplicity there
was more musical meaning than words could exhaust. Aside from the way he
attacked the first note, creating a catapulting sense of swing, there was the way
its relative densityits heavy, centered soundcontrasted with the grainier, more
oblique tonal texture of the second note. The effect of this might be compared to a
gymnasts second, more easeful bounce on a trampoline....The creation and
control of such effects, in which the abstract and emotional aspects of jazz
become one thing, is what Cobbs music is all about. And if the principles at work
in that Yah-duh, which lasted no more than a second, are expanded to cover an
entire performance, it is easy to imagine just how richly varied this masters
language can be."WH