Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver [Paperback] Review

The LAST thing this book does is get to the nitty-gritty.Primarily a string of recollections and anecdotes, this light-as-a-feather book hardly constitutes a proper biography for such an important (and still breathing) figure in the pantheon of jazz.

Pastras' research seems to have consisted of going over to Horace's house every Sunday for bull sessions.And that's how the book reads.There are the expected misspellings and typos (Wilt Chamberlin, Carl Burnette, et al) and multiple repetitions of events.

The ARE some interesting tidbits buried here as Horace can be quite the raconteur.His story about Dizzy Gillespie's visit to his apartment is touching and his story about being unable to sit in for Otis Spann because he couldn't play the blues in Muddy's key signature was both amusing and alarming.Horace not able to play the blues???His multiple brushes with racism, drug enforcement and police power are chilling.

But mostly the book is a name-dropper's paradise, recounting all of the famous and semi-famous celebrities our boy has met over the past 50 years.He sure has a steel-trap memory!But why he would exhibit such excitement about a chance sighting of a has-been former actress walking her dog in Central Park and then need to recount it in his autobiography 40 years later is beyond me.

The curious reader will search in vain for clues to his musical talent (other than tea kettle whistles and the like).Very few of his compositions are even mentioned much less subjected to some sort of analysis.Other than Tyrone Washington, for whom he saves some choice invective, very few of his colleagues are discussed in detail, including incredibly Art Blakey.This relationship should have occupied a full chapter.What about Joe Henderson?Woody Shaw?Bob Berg?

The reader is left with a picture of a lonely and fearful man, evidently estranged from his family.(He sees his only son "once or twice a year"!!!)He's uneducated but yearns for deeper understanding.A fine jazz craftsman, Silver contends with eruptions of artism that apparently mystify and ultimately confound him.

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Jazz The Golden Era [Hardcover] Review

This is a scatological romp through most of the early history of Jazz with suitable riffs here and there. It is well that it includes a CD of 20 priceless tracks for the biographic sketches, while interesting at times, are not to be mistaken for the real deal. They are mostly a glorified discography, with historical tidbits thrown in from time to time. Despite the fact that some of them make important links to modern Jazz, I am still waiting for a book that properly recognizes the two quite separate entities and their quite separate histories.

As always, the handful of heavyweights get top billing, but even in the case of Satchmo (the heaviest of them all), the full range of these musicians' talents get short shrift: And while it is true that they were all entertainers (mostly having to pander to all white audiences), they were almost without exception fluent on more than one instrument, could both compose and direct their own charts, had secondary jobs and even secondary careers, and almost to a man and woman, had interesting non-musical careers and lives.

My main complaint is that no distinction is made between the shift from "white Jazz," which was pretty much a one dimensional repetitive extension of New Orleans Dixieland, and "Modern" or "Progressive Jazz," ushered in in the early 1940s by Diz and Bird, which at least aesthetically was quite a bit more. Most writers somewhat disingenuously conflate the two always failing to make clear that even though the connections between the two are indirect, that there nevertheless was a sea change and clear disconnect between them when Bird and Diz came on the scene.

This is probably not the place to fight this battle, but the problem with conflating the two is that the "old school" invariably gets over emphasized while the "new school" (the much more important one in my humble view) gets under emphasized. I have been watching this procession most of my life and it seems that no one is prepared to make the necessary mid-course corrections to right this imbalance.

I am not arguing that the two do not have the same pedigree: quite clearly they do, but the younger child, modern Jazz, is the far richer and more expressive of the two. I just believe that it is high time that modern Jazz starts getting its proper due. And here, by beginning with Louis Armstrong and ending with Miles Davis, leaving out the likes of John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Sonny Rollins, etc., Modern Jazz is still being put in the back seat of the musical bus. Three stars

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Product Description:
In the 1940s, a young generation of jazz musicians forged a new style out of the swing music of the 1930s. A new breed of players like Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Thelonius Monk transformed the jazz scene with advanced harmonies, complex syncopation and chord substitutions. Illustrated with photographs from the William Gottlieb collection, this book and sampler CD is a perfect introduction to this important era of jazz.

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