The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz
By Gerald Majer
Columbia University Press, 211 pages, $27.50
The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir
By Mike Zwerin
Yale University Press, 214 pages, $26
The Devil’s Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, From Noisy Novelty to King of Cool
By Michael Segell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pages, $25
In his Baroque homage to the Chicago sound, “The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz,” Gerald Majer writes:
More Top Picks Best Cassette Air Conditioners
“[M]usic . . . has something inherently subversive and baffling about it. It is like and yet unlike language (at least in the conventional sense), is inherently unstable insofar as music doesn’t necessarily refer to an object, locate a signifier in relation to a signified. Music is signifying itself.”
The abstract and rarefied quality of music makes it a tricky subject to write about, but the authors of three books rise to the challenge of writing about the cerebral and complex sound of jazz.
Majer, an accomplished poet, tries to catch this elusive creature in his propulsive, breathless prose, which imitates jazz in the way he takes a phrase and endlessly embroiders it, stretching it out almost to the breaking point and then doubling back. He is a virtuoso writer, wrapping the reader in his lush descriptions of concerts, fragmentary portraits of working-class Chicago and his own experience as a devoted listener of jazz.
In addition to gorgeous descriptions of musicians’ performances, he writes about life in “apartheid Chicago,” as he calls the segregated city of the 1960s. He sees jazz everywhere, in the restrained violence at his father’s workshop, the sounds of trains, the rhythm of an assembly line, but mostly in the life of his city. He writes that “Chicago . . . doesn’t stop, the way it burns and consumes itself–not in the vibrant insomniac manner of a Manhattan but instead like a twenty-four-hour factory, three shifts, the machines working always, smoke and sparks and clatter, shouts and metal thunder sounding along the floor, human bodies driven like robots and taking by contagion powers of tooling and process and machine.”
Compare that to his description of Gene Ammons’ saxophone, “a lyric, swaying juggernaut on the verge of overwhelming [the music], chopping off a phrase with tensed menace, collapsing an arpeggio into a broken staircase, bursting through the octave with a stabbing slashing roaring.”
Majer is also aware of how later Chicago jazz, especially the experimental work of people like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra, can be a difficult and even frustrating listening experience. He writes:
“The thrust of the music is so hard, so resolutely against the grain of comfort, so far from the realm of jazz with a hook, jazz with a groove, jazz counting you down through changes and melody and easily lifting you with the buoyancy of the solo, I imagine my wife instantly hating it. I too want to refuse it.”
Sometimes Majer’s prose can do the same thing, pushing the reader to his or her own limit with endless lists and relentlessly intricate syntax. The book is best encountered like music, letting it wash over you and enjoying the texture, letting yourself get lost in the vertiginous writing.
Mike Zwerin, veteran jazz columnist for the International Herald Tribune, deals with the challenge of writing about music by not writing about music. Rather, in his desultory memoir, “The Parisian Jazz Chronicles,” he writes about the atmosphere and culture surrounding musicians. He writes more about Chet Baker’s heroin use than his innovation and contributions to bebop, more about Miles Davis’ attitude than his playing. Zwerin also charts his own bitter struggle with being “stuck in Paris” at loose ends, and his bizarre peregrinations chasing obscure players around Europe. It’s a quirky book that takes some getting used to, but once you nestle into his strange style (he refers to himself in the third person), it is a brisk, humorous and bitter tale of the cultural nuttiness of being an ex-pat–and a drug-addicted ex-pat at that.
The third person actually works because it gives an odd distance, evoking the dislocation of being a foreigner. Zwerin writes of his condition, “Alienation is no longer a problem on the road; you are alien everywhere.” It’s also easier to admit to snorting Ritalin in the third person, and he admits as much. “Please forgive the dirty words and the multiple identities,” he writes. “They are clumsy devices, and probably cop-outs, but there’s a lot to cop out from.”
Zwerin’s 25-odd years freelancing for the International Herald Tribune have given him a cynical worldview, and his weary wit is evident in quips like, “Acid jazz seemed like a good idea at the time,” and, “Treating pop lyrics as deep metaphysical truths was really dumb.” His style is hard-bitten and alluring, but not always plausible. It is never clear if Zwerin likes any of the musicians or even enjoys his work. He pouts over having to cover the Beatles and rather disingenuously spends pages trying to remember the name of a little folk singer called Bob Dylan.
Although the newspaper has sent him to interview some of the greats, like Dylan and Davis (there is a fabulous scene of a post-drugs Davis painting in a Paris hotel room), Zwerin is most comfortable on the fringes. He travels to Siberia to hear jazz during perestroika, the reform period begun in the Soviet Union in the mid-’80s, and writes about a little-known album of ballads by beer mogul Freddy Heineken. He is also a musician, playing one of the more marginalized instruments, the trombone, “an ungainly, awkward, beastly instrument” that “takes extreme dedication and a well-developed sense of irony.”
It’s a fun read by a writer with a nifty style, but it’s not particularly illuminating about the European jazz scene in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s a kind of curio cabinet of Zwerin’s experience careening around Europe with cocaine in the Kleenex box on his car seat, full of intriguing but sketchy characters and a self-conscious absurdity. Zwerin eventually hits bottom and begins his recovery, a term not without irony, like “serious music.”
There is something so personal about music that writers can’t help but try to inject themselves into the story, as Michael Segell does in “The Devil’s Horn,” a jerky chronicle of the 160-year history of the saxophone interspersed with the story of his attempts to play the beguiling instrument.
The saxophone was invented by Belgian instrument-maker Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s. It brought together “the tonal qualities of the woodwinds, the projection of the brasses, and the flexibility of the strings.” It was a full orchestra in one instrument, and saxophones were adopted by French military bands (Sax had moved to France), which took them to Mexico in the 1860s. They gradually made their way to New Orleans and came to dominate the jazz and pop scene in the U.S. America fell in love with the sax, and in the decade following World War I, nearing 1 million were sold here. The versatile instrument made its way into meringue, marching bands and even Indian classical music. Of course, the saxophone’s influence was felt most acutely in jazz, pioneered by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and John Coltrane, among others.
The instrument has inspired love and revulsion, been banned by the Catholic Church, spurned by classical musicians and seen as lascivious and dangerous. Segell refers to it as “music’s gifted but resentful bastard child”
Segell bounces through this history, drawing on interviews with collectors, historians, scholars and musicians. An editor at the New York Daily News, he has a journalist’s ability to deftly draw vibrant characters in a few strokes, capturing the brilliance and idiosyncrasy of his subjects, but he is a woefully inefficient storyteller and can’t seem to handle and organize all the information. He constantly shifts around in time and location, interrupting stories with ponderous history only to return to the original narrative long after the reader has lost its thread. This can be disheartening.
Segell also charts his own love affair with the instrument, announcing his infatuation early on. He gushes, “I’ve come a long way toward understanding why Adolphe Sax’s extraordinary creation, the most recent important musical instrument to have been invented, was so quickly embraced by the world, why millions of players and listeners have so willingly submitted to its spell–and why so many others, frightened by its diabolical charm, have tried throughout its short history to malign or suppress it.” His prose borders on purple, as when he describes the low notes of the sax as “maybe what the universe sounded like during the first few howling seconds after creation.” The generally readable and fact-crammed chapters are interrupted by italicized passages that describe Segell’s development as a saxophonist. These sections are extraneous and syrupy, and the book reads much better if they are skipped. When Segell shows restraint, he can render juicy descriptions, like one of Hawkins playing “a thrusting, slurred, harmonically complex solo on which . . . he ignored the beat and allowed his phrase to flow past the bar lines.” Or his clean and efficient description of Young: “As a soloist, he was always slightly askant of the original tune, hovering just outside its melodic conventions, dipping in occasionally to signify a keynote or phrase for reference, then embarking again on some lonely exposition.”
Louis Armstrong once famously quipped, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” But that has never stopped writers from trying to explain what it is and why it has such a hold on us.