Talking Jazz

This is probably the best book of interviews with contemporary jazz musicians in print. They derive from Ben Sidran's show on NPR, _Sidran on Record_; they date from the mid-1980s to 1990, & thus capture jazz during something of a resurgence as "classic" jazz become newly fashionable. But Sidran doesn't seem especially interested in following the neo-hard-bop line--Wynton & Branford Marsalis are interviewed here, but that's about it. Instead, Sidran is interested at once in the "classic" jazz players (most of the players he interviews are from the generation that came to prominence in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s); and also in emphasizing jazz as a pluralist idiom that feeds into many varieties of popular music. Thus he also interviews musicians like Dr John, Joe Sample, Charles Brown, Steve Gadd, Bobby McFerrin, even Donald Fagen from Steely Dan. He also touches on the avantgarde with interviews with Don Cherry, Archie Shepp & David Murray; & there are interviews with a few important nonmusicians: the recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder & Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard. There are some marvelous interviews here--for instance, the one with the great Michel Petrucciani, where he sounds as joyous & rambunctious as on any of his recordings. Miles Davis is unusually relaxed--no revelations, but it's still worth reading. The interview with Keith Jarrett makes him sound as spacey & self-important as one would guess from his recordings. The interview with Don Cherry is an excellent memorial to an irreplaceable musician. Interesting to hear him talk about his & Ornette's hanging around Harry Partch, or going to hear a Stockhausen concert in the 1950s. -- Wynton Marsalis is mentioned several times by other musicians in the book, both positively (Betty Carter) & with doubts about his agendas & approach (Herbie Hancock); the interview with Marsalis isn't one of his most memorably opinionated & polemical, though it has its moments which will be catnip to Marsalophiles & -phobes alike. (E.g. the judgment that _The Birth of the Cool_ was irrelevant to the development of jazz & was merely "gorillaed into the history of the music"--a remark that is pretty crass in the context of a volume that also contains an interview with Gil Evans.) The Marsalis verbal tics & oddities of phrasing are well-displayed--e.g. the comment that the members of the Coltrane quartet "would just swing on the highest level of serious Negroid implication". The only problems with this book are a lack of an index, & the occasion mistranscription of a name (the bane of interviews). The transcriptions seem to be lightly edited, which is very welcome--I'm not a fan of interview volumes that preserve every stumble & hesitation. They read very well. For the record here are the subjects: Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Jay McShann, Red Rodney, Frank Morgan, John Hendricks, Max Roach, Willie Ruff, Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Horace Silve