James Lincoln Collier

[The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History] by James Lincoln Collier
This book has been on my bookshelves a long time, since 1984 in fact. Most of my books are second hand and this one looks second hand and so as usual I turned to the front-piece to see if anybody had written anything in it. They had, but I was amazed to find it was a dedication to me and so the book would have been bought new, it had been bought by my girlfriend at the time. I don't know what has happened to her, but I show more have finally got round to reading the book she bought me and what an excellent book it is.

Originally published in 1981, Collier in his final chapter looks forward to the future of jazz music. He says that the future of jazz is in the past:

"Jazz needs, at the moment, a respite from experiments. It needs time to consolidate it's gains, to go back and re-examine what is there. There is enough work undone to last many lifetimes."

How prophetic, because this is exactly what has happened. Back in 1981 the avant-garde or free jazz movement had run it's course and critics and commentators were wondering where the music was heading next due to it's history of seismic shifts. The answer has been an examination of the past with lines now becoming increasingly blurred between rock, classical, experimental and jazz music. This blurring of lines however may upset Collier a little because in his book he is clear to make a distinction between jazz and other music, he would find it more difficult today.

A comprehensive history of a musical form covering a period of some 80 years in 500 pages is a tall order, but Collier gets it all down with ease. His theme is the development of the music and the important musicians who have made this possible, but he goes further and relates this to the social context in America. Jazz is an American music phenomenon and essentially it was a black man's music and the struggles for civil rights since the second world war have been part of that music. I refrained from finding out about Mr Collier until I had finished the book, but my conclusions that he is a white professional musician proved to be correct.

Collier has written a chronological history and he starts with the roots of jazz; African rhythms and blues field hollers and how this influenced the first period of classic jazz that originated from New Orleans. The legendary cornet player Buddy Bolden is represented by a photograph from 1895, but that is all we have, because he was too early to be recorded. The first jazz recording was made in 1917 (by five white musicians from New Orleans) this was no way representative of the music at the time, but it just happened by chance that the Original Dixieland Jass Band got to make the first record. The book from this moment gets into its stride with Collier providing pen pictures of the real movers and shakers amongst the musicians that made up this first explosion of the music. Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith along with many others who followed in their wake. There is a chapter on the white influx, because bands were segregated in those days and so the music developed in a sort of parallel world: some space is therefore given to Jack Teagarden, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbeck.

The first of those seismic shifts came with the evolution into swing music and the introduction of the big jazz bands, but Collier is also careful not to lose sight of other developments particularly in piano music and in the splinter groups that formed out of the big bands. The period before the second world war saw the gradual integration of black and white musicians, but it was a relatively slow process and presented difficulties for those involved. At the end of the war the first Bebop groups started making records and the music loving public had to learn almost a whole new language to appreciate what the new younger musicians were doing. Collier explains why this was so from a musical point of view and also puts it in a social context. A drugs culture that had always been present in Jazz music seemed to become a veritable plague amongst the Beboppers with heroin the drug of choice. There are many stories of musicians succumbing to addiction and Collier mentions these without straying too far away from the music that was being made. In the early fifties there was a reaction against the bebop from the traditional jazz revivalists and the cool jazz practitioners from the west coast. Collier charts the progress of these various musical strands highlighting those musicians that were comfortable in moving across the musical boundaries. The late fifties early sixties was the time for the free jazz practitioners to take the music in another direction again and the final chapter of the book features John Coltrane with Collier wondering if the musician was going to be considered the new jazz messiah, by future generations.

Throughout the book the musicians that impress Collier most are those that have the ability to move away from what he terms as the ground beat; the true practitioners of jazz in his opinion and he goes into some detail explaining how this effect is achieved. Collier describes the music they played and points out in his opinion the best examples of their work. He also attempts a musical analysis of some of the main trends which might not be easily understood by non musicians, but it is not in too much detail and would still give a flavour of what was happening with the music. He is of course impressed by musical expertise, but is quite clear that a limited technical ability has not been a hindrance to many jazz musicians. I think he treads this difficult line with real insight. The limited space available makes it difficult to chart the progress of jazz music around the world and during the period of recorded music that Collier covers 1917 to the late 1960's most of the innovations happened in America. There is a perfunctory chapter on European jazz, which might concern some readers, but is probably appropriate.

Collier provides a discography of over 300 recordings covering the period that he critiques in his book and would serve as an excellent guide for those people wanting to hear just what he is talking about. I have been listening to jazz since the late 1960's and have a fairly good knowledge of the music since the second world war and so based on what I know I am happy to let Collier guide me through the gaps in my knowledge of the earlier period of jazz. He also provides a decent bibliography, but I have a feeling it may be a little white author centred, for example there is only one book listed by Leroi Jones.

This really is a comprehensive book on the making of jazz and quite an achievement in itself. I have a couple of criticisms which did not get in the way of my enjoyment of the book. Collier spends some time in a search for the holy grail; that is the perfect improvised jazz solo and his analysis of some musicians efforts can feel a little academic. My other criticism is that the book is obviously written by a white author and his subject is an essentially black music (historically at least): now I am not saying that white people cannot write about black music which is almost as stupid as saying white musicians can't play jazz, but maybe Collier places undue emphasis on some white musicians role in the history of the music. He acknowledges that some black musicians also took the civil rights movement into the concert halls and jazz clubs and while there is no overt criticism of this stance I get the feeling that he would rather they just get on and play the music.

There is no doubting Colliers love and feeling for the music and this shines through his text. It is a considered and carefully thought through love, that is not without criticism of some of the music. It is going to be an expensive book for me as I have made a list of recordings that I want to hear: fortunately these days, jazz reissues of earlier music can be had for little money. A five star read that comes with an unqualified recommendation. show less

James Lincoln Collier calls himself a jazz historian, but he does not have much to say about particular performances or recordings, and he mostly ignores jazz after the mid-1950s. Nonetheless, his method of excavating and interpreting primary sources provokes a reconsideration of much that is taken for granted about jazz history to the mid-20th century, so his books are worthwhile as background to some of the most interesting controversies in the jazz bibliography.

In The Reception of Jazz in show more America (1988), Collier investigates two myths which he believes have misrepresented the evolution of jazz and its place in American culture. (His subtitle—"A New View”—may be ironic, since his critique takes aim at works published 30 years previous). The first myth is that the American people disdained and ignored jazz for decades, relegating it to the margins of public consciousness; the second myth is that jazz was first taken seriously by Europeans. These myths have been perpetuated in the jazz bibliography by the likes of Whitney Balliett, Rudi Blesh, Marshall Stearns, John Hammond and Eric Hobsbawm—all people who should have known better, in Collier’s opinion.

Writers before Collier (James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison) have situated jazz and black music in general in the mainstream of American culture across the 20th century, but the point bears reiteration. Black performers had been attracting white audiences since the end of the Civil War, in minstrel shows, variety shows and vaudeville. Blacks were producing shows for Broadway in the 1890s, and by the early 20th century ‘black-composed music was part of an accepted national song style.’ After 1910 or so, black musicians took a major role in supplying dance music for whites, from New Orleans to the west coast and in towns along the Mississippi up to Chicago. (James Weldon Johnson wrote a newspaper column in 1915 explaining the phenomenon to a disgruntled white musician). By 1917, says Collier, publications including Variety, Billboard, Literary Digest, and Popular Mechanics were reporting on the jazz ‘craze’ sweeping the nation; ‘by the 1920s, jazz music and jazz dancing…were known and accepted by the public at large.’

As for the question of the reception of jazz in Europe, Collier notes that the 1919 performance in England by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (which made the first jazz record in 1917, in New York) was a flop, and that no ‘important’ American groups visited Europe between the ODJB’s tour in 1919 and Louis Armstrong’s appearance in 1932. A decade after jazz broke through to public consciousness in the U.S., there was little popular interest in jazz in Europe; no cabarets featured jazz full time, the press ignored jazz almost totally, there was no jazz on the radio, and only a small number of ‘real’ jazz records were issued until the end of the 1920s. ‘Record reviewers in European specialty magazines only slowly came to recognize the difference between “hot” music and ordinary dance music.’ Musicians acknowledged as jazz masters in the U.S. met with indifference in Europe: Armstrong’s performances in 1932 and Duke Ellington’s in 1933 did not attract the kinds of large audiences that would have enabled them to work there regularly. Jazz became popular in Europe only during World War Two, says Collier, mostly because the Nazis ‘anathematized jazz as black and Jewish, and going to concerts became a political act.’

Collier’s research into primary sources effectively undermines the myths of American indifference to and European celebration of jazz in the first half of the 20th century, but his critique also raises the question as to why such myths were proffered, believed and perpetuated. His view is that many mid-century jazz critics and commentators were influenced by a ‘leftist’ political agenda which aimed to portray the U.S. as negligent in its devotion to democracy and racial equality. According to Collier, such commentators intended to contrast America’s mistreatment of its own black population, as evidenced by its ignorant dismissal of jazz, with Europeans’ enlightened racial views and embrace of jazz as an art form. The Reception of Jazz in America undercuts that dichotomy, but the problematique is muddier than Collier acknowledges. For instance, the Europeans Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié are often presented as early authorities on jazz by later writers, but Collier draws attention to the ignorance and prejudice that afflicted both, and cites the low opinions of Goffin and Panassié held by their American contemporaries Otis Ferguson, E. Simms Campbell and Franklin Marshall Davis (each of whom held complicated political views that would take Collier several additional chapters to adequately unpack). Goffin viewed American blacks through a primitivist lens, but he also wrote of the U.S. as a symbol of freedom and democracy for Europeans, and of the genius of jazz as a reflection of the American spirit. Panassié, according to John Gennari, had a bit of a reactionary streak. That jazz can be discussed at all in ideological terms, though, says much about the influence of cultural and sociological conditions on the music (and vice versa), and about the evolution of the writing and thinking about jazz since the first decades of the 20th century. And Collier’s concern with the ideological contents of jazz history also carries contemporary resonance, as the debate about jazz and race flared anew in the 1980s and 90s.
. show less

My Brother Sam is Dead offers a surprisingly unbiased look at the American Revolution. Some may hate this one for its brutal honesty regarding the Patriots, unvarnished by the usual idealistic gloss we get in school, but I think it's one of the best out there, especially for this age range, and will make sure my daughter reads it when she is old enough. Why not 5 stars? I would have liked to know Sam a little better, to have liked him and cared about him more.

First sentence: It was April, and outside in the dark the rain whipped against the windows of our tavern, making a sound like muffled drums.

Premise/plot: My Brother Sam is Dead is historical fiction for middle grade (and/or upper elementary grades). It is set during the American Revolution. The narrator, Timmy Meeker, spends the duration of the book confused by the complexities of war. He isn't really in favor or support of either side. He wants things to go back to normal. He hates that his show more brother Sam has been kicked out of the family for his "rebel" views and joining up with the Patriots. He knows his dad leans more towards being a Tory or Royalist. But also at the same time his dad has ALL THE OPINIONS that war is the worst thing on the planet.

My thoughts: This was my first time to read My Brother Sam is Dead. When I started it, I thought I would like it more than I did.

I picked up on the anti-war sentiment from the start. That didn't surprise me. I didn't expect war to be glamorized or idolized. I expected the view point to be war is UGLY, war is MESSY, war is TRAUMATIC, war is HORRIBLE. Many if not most books about war--any war--touch upon this ugliness, this trauma, this raw pain, this sorrow.

My Brother Sam Is Dead was written and published towards the end of the Vietnam War. Anti-war sentiment was high. America was also a few years away from celebrating the bicentennial. I don't know if either of these facts had any impact at all on the story these brothers were telling, were sharing. But it doesn't escape my attention that they might have wanted to remind readers that just because the war happened two hundred years ago, doesn't make it any less ugly, horrifying, terrifying, gross, disgusting, revolting, traumatizing. The "cause" they were fighting for did not negate the reality of war being what it fundamentally is.

I guess what surprised me, and probably shouldn't have, is the way Tim loses his father and his brother. Not the fact that both died--or either died. BUT the how. It isn't so much that Sam Meeker dies in the novel. It is the how and why. The father's death was sad and unnecessary, but it was the brother's death that turns the novel about.

I do think that adult readers may read the book differently perhaps. I'm not sure. I do know that this is a book that I never would have picked up as a kid or teen.

As an adult, I was seeing things not so much through Tim's eyes but through the eyes of his parents. show less