What's the deal with 60's jazz liner notes?

That said, I agree with Wimmels - the vast majority of jazz album liner notes are informative and interesting.

Sure, I'll give you informative and interesting. At least for the ones that tell me something about the artist and the musical structure.

It's the tone that I can't understand. It's like a lot of them were trying to ape some writing style that I haven't really encountered elsewhere. "Erudite" is one word for the Herb Wong excerpt above, but probably wouldn't be the first adjective I'd choose.

xxpost:

Haha! So do I, and he posts on this forum!

internet describes herb wong as "US-amerikanischer Jazzhistoriker, Hörfunkjournalist, Musikpädagoge"

i wd describe that particular extract as "paid by the word but hadn't a lot to say"

I thought this was just how people talked back then.

i always wondered how miles felt about the liner notes to ESP:

The following abstract and impressionistic poem by Ralph J Gleason, syndicated columnist for The San Francisco columnist, is composed almost entirely of Davis' album titles, or titles of selections contained in these albums.

Miles...Musings
(To be read aloud as music is to be heard)

leaving the rest to yr imagination...

In Miles Davis' autobiography, he mentions that as soon as he had enough clout with Columbia, he made them stop including liner notes on his albums, and I can see why he did that.

tbf, Miles records had some of the worst liner notes ever (with a handful of exceptions). The notes for Miles Smiles were something like (I'm paraphrasing), "Look at that! Miles is smiling! Smiling Miles! Who woulda thunk it? What a smile! And it's Miles!" etc. etc. ad infinitum

Blue Note liner notes were usually decent, particularly those by Nat Hentoff (ditto his Impulse notes). But sometimes you'd get shit like Ira Gitler's notes for Hank Mobley/Lee Morgan's Peckin' Time which were something like, "Do you like to play word-association games? I do!"

But the reissues for the '60s Miles albums have great liner notes. Super technical but not pseudo-intellectual and corny like in the op (although I haven't seen them since high school/college, so maybe?).

I love this stuff tbh

they should have hired cecil taylor to write all of them

my first encounter with this was the song-by-song dissections in the liner notes of time out. i loved them and i felt like i was learning so much. no idea how they'd read to me today

a particularly indulgent example that comes to mind is ralph gleason's notes for bitches brew but they still feel like a pretty accurate, earnest reflection of hearing that record

wondering if these started before or after the very sober sleeve notes you got/get on classical records

Love these. May have to post some fave bits here as I come across them.

in the pro column: they often took the music/artist really seriously in a world that mostly didn't give a shit. and in the 50s/60s these were often records made by really young people who really wanted to be taken seriously.

there are plenty of cons in the con column. i have a lot of problems with jazz writing but it would take me all day to talk about it.

i thought of starting a tumblr for the anti-free jazz rants on the back of 60's albums. "not for so and so the formless rants and unschooled honks..."

which i always thought was a little unfair to begin with. pitting someone against an entire movement on the back of their album. they didn't ask for that.

why were they like this? because that was the sales pitch. to enjoy (read: buy) jazz/classical/avant garde music was to be hip, sophisticated and erudite, one step ahead of the pipe-and-armchair-lacking square next door.

the people who bothered to do it for very little money were completely obsessed. and they all had their obsessions and blind spots. hentoff and gitler and morgenstern were always worth reading though.

there was a point in time when nat hentoff was writing almost entire ISSUES of down beat under different names. and writing for newspapers and other magazines and doing liner notes. 24/7 jazz life.

earliest i can track down -- via google and nous -- is "the modern jazz society presents a concert of contemporary music" (1955), notes by john lewis, a norman granz production, music arranged and conducted by gunther schuller

which is self-consciously very "classical" in tone and content and look (schuller invented the term "third stream" in 1957 to cover this kind of music) -- classical including sober discussion of forn and such, a mild element of musicological analysis

(i'd wondered if stan kenton had any for his "progressive jazz" releases, which begin in the late 40s, but can't pin any down)

classical releases certainly had notes before this -- i've got a columbia release from 1953 of albert schweitzer playing back on the organ -- though i think they were pretty rare in the era of 78s, ie pre-1948, except perhaps in quite fancy box sets of 78s (or "albums", as they were called)

brubeck's time out (1959) had liner notes for steve race -- hip AND erudite -- which matched its crossover into a sutdent audience, brubeck as cover star on time magazine

grammies for liner notes date back to 1964 (first one went to an ellington record, liner notes by leonard feather and stanley dance)

liner notes BY steve race, i mean

jazz liner notes were already really common by 1955. even ten inch records in 1952 and later had full back cover notes.

"the modern jazz society presents a concert of contemporary music" (1955), notes by john lewis, a norman granz production, music arranged and conducted by gunther schuller

The music was also by Lewis, who would later form the Modern Jazz Quartet with some of the same guys, with the explicit aim of combining classical ideas and jazz improvisation.

ira in 1953:

https://img.discogs.com/4R0VwUaRiUnYtuwTjO4GZeZHbMI=/fit-in/460x437/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-3385460-1328353413.jpeg.jpg

earlier than 1953 and you might just get a catalog on the back of a ten-inch.

before the 50's you had to read down beat and metronome to get the scoop.

1951:

https://img.discogs.com/Bdju6x39kJwSgUBMh2NoUPHhHw8=/fit-in/600x525/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-5938154-1427079076-7650.jpeg.jpg

and then there was Folkways. with their handy comprehensive inserts that could be long indeed.

so the question is, did any jazz get liner notes that wasn't linked to directly john lewis and/or MJQ?

(i think my 10" of birth of the cool does: that was recorded in 1949, with lewis on-board, but not issued in 10" form until 1954: anyway i can't find it to check)

and come to think of asch recordings predates folkways for jazz liners. from the 40's:

https://img.discogs.com/Am-j22VmhwO_q_UNyLZDra_B06I=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-6300066-1441833398-2703.jpeg.jpg

so, anyway, jazz liners get going in the 40s and really get going by the mid-50's.

oh asch! good call -- never owned any

how do we feel about Leonard Feather? unrelated aside: I just flipped thru some jazz LPs looking for liner notes and noticed that Eddie Harris' I Need Some Money was produced by Geoffrey Haslam, same guy who produced MC5's High Time. Small world.

milt gabler was a big history buff and commodore releases could be pretty comprehensive. from 1949:

https://img.discogs.com/JZox8hCSKPFP3D7-3BdU0drvwO4=/fit-in/600x626/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-3869095-1414741950-4722.jpeg.jpg

"how do we feel about Leonard Feather?"

he was an invaluable resource who hated lots of great stuff. but if you wanted to connect dots in the 50's he was your guy.

how do we feel about Leonard Feather? unrelated aside: I just flipped thru some jazz LPs looking for liner notes and noticed that Eddie Harris' I Need Some Money was produced by Geoffrey Haslam, same guy who produced MC5's High Time

... and VU's Loaded.

I keep meaning to start a poll between Loaded and High Time: same producer, same label, same year (just about), both swan songs.

great comparison, both are also refinement/reduction of earlier, raunchier more out-there work

not reduction in a dumb way, more like boiling down to its essence

loaded wins because i always forget to play high time and i don't even know if i still have a copy.

this has all led me to want to buy this on ebay because i can't find the stockhausen thing online...

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/5EMAAOSwHJhXM9mT/s-l1600.jpg

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Jazz-Pop-Magazine-Dec-1969-Steppenwolf-Electronic-Music-Best-of-A-Cappella-/361556005154?hash=item542e6ad122:g:5EMAAOSwHJhXM9mT

that's where threads about 60's jazz liner notes lead me. buying magazines on ebay. the internet wins again!

agree about Loaded. couple real clinkers on High Time along with some classics. Fred Sonic taking the wheel...back to jazz notes

"Like A Rolling Stone by Ralph J Gleason"

wonder if this was about the magazine? RJG was mentor to J Wenner back in the day

it was probably about dylan.

it's actually a manifesto:

http://www.jannswenner.com/press/like_a_rolling_stone.aspx

stockhausen's open letter just says "cosine this^^^"

so, anyway, jazz liners get going in the 40s and really get going by the mid-50's.

The first 33 1/3 LPs were released in 1948, and stereo LPs took off in 1958. During those years, hi-fi equipment and LPs were fairly expensive compared to other music listening options, so prestige and cultural appeal were important aspects of their marketing. Liner notes like these let the buyer know he was not getting just any old jazz record but some seriously high-brow product, flattering his taste and helping him rationalize his investment in gear.

I got to figure for some mainstream listeners, Playboy was actually a way to find out about records and musicians as they did the yearly "all star team" and quite a few reviews and articles about jazz musicians.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PTygdWfv7K8/UCgcNmHCj6I/AAAAAAAAD_0/LmgEN9MFWco/s1600/utterback.jpg

Holy shit xxp

I thought the term Directions In Music came from Miles dislike of the term Jazz. & that's late 60s/early 70s.
I thought it stemmed from the word Jazz being devalued from an early point like the 'King of Jazz' being a white popularising copy of something more original. Think that term dated back to the 20s or 30s, so wonder if Miles was ever happy calling the music Jazz.
I would think he must talk about it in the Autobiography but I haven't read that in years.

This thread is AWESOME!!

Mingus and Miles aren't looking too happy in the 1967 Playboy All-Star Band, I can't imagine why.

I wonder what they thought about that Columbia ad over at Motown?

In the context we're talking about, Motown would have been regarded as teenybopper malarky, right?

There's a lot to parse in that Playboy caricature. The Supremes showing up suggests maybe Motown wasn't just teen music, but then there's Al Hirt next to Miles, like Captain Kangaroo showing up at Woodstock. The Supremes presence might just be because there weren't any more jazz vocal groups, and they were trying to keep long-standing categories covered.

Still, I'd think that the hi-fi enthusiasts who were getting guidance from liner notes wouldn't have perceived Motown as possessing the prestige they were trying to cultivate.

that Playboy pic is hilarious. Don't think Miles would be cool w/getting first seat while Al Hirt gets 2nd and fucking LOUIS ARMSTRONG gets third

They call 'em jazz mags for a reason!

it comes out of a horn and who knows where it goes

miles thought that al hirt was a very good trumpet player. he always had compliments for people you wouldn't think he'd have compliments for. and the other way around.

http://www.forghieri.net/jazz/blind/Davis_4.html

it's not that, it's that he idolized Louis

susan sontag's "one culture and the new sensibility (collected in "against interpretation") was published in 1965 -- this is the essay where she stepped out as a supremes fan, so they had highbrow imprimatur if not the hi-fi stamp of prestige

(and this was a widely discussed declaration of fan-dom: tom wolfe had poked fun at it)

Michael Henderson who went onto being Miles bassist in the early 70s was on some Motown material. Not sure what, so would assume that Miles became interested in using him because of taht.

part of me feels like jazz is still trying to recover from the publication of Le Jazz Hot in 1934 by Hugues Panassie. he was obsessed with "authenticity" as so many writers have been since. i wonder if he ever hung out with robert crumb.

Henderson isn't on any Motown recordings (at least, I'm pretty sure), but Miles heard him in Stevie Wonder's touring band:

Before working with Davis, Henderson had been touring with Stevie Wonder, whom he met at the Regal Theater in Chicago while warming up for a gig. Davis saw the young Henderson performing at the Copacabana in New York City in early 1970 and reportedly said to Wonder simply "I’m taking your fucking bassist."[3]

xp

still picking away at this mildly interesting scab: when miles first publicly expressed dislike for the word jazz

from his december 1969 rolling stone interview with don demichael:
"But I don't like the word rock and roll and all that shit. Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. It's a white folks word. I never heard that shit until I read it in a magazine"

obviously this is several months after "in a silent way" came out (it was released june 1969) -- so frank glenn, the liner notes writer, couldn't have read them in rolling stone

had he said something like this in an earlier interview? (obviously not impossible, tho iirc the RS interview was conceived as a deliberate game-change and direction-shifter) (happy to be corrected on this, i'm working entirely from memory away from my books in a funny little edinburgh guest house w/children's drawings of HAGGISES as hotel art)

(who had interviewed him previously? down beat presumably, and ebony... any other suggestions? rolling stone was establishing a new approach to interviews, encouraging its interviewees to be more politically impolitic than more established publications, tho in practice the new journalism was already out there with the cusswords and the imagined internal monologues)

stevolende suggested he'd maybe always thought of the word like this: quite possibly, but there's plainly an evolution in the politics of his public statements -- for example he became (justiably) a good deal more dgaf testy after the nypd attacked him outside birdland (which was 1959)

xp Coltrane comes in as second tenor in a poll published a couple of months after his death ... it was a strange time.

By 1968 (maybe earlier) it had become the Playboy Jazz and Pop Poll. Winners that year included Ravi Shankar and the Beatles alongside the ever-popular Mancini and Fountain.

i just call it "that so-called jazz music".

miles thought that al hirt was a very good trumpet player.

Boy, maybe, but that whole entry reads like the definition of 'backhanded compliment.'

i love this essay. from 1920. Concerning Jazz by Henry F. Gilbert. he concludes by saying that so-called serious music in America won't be any good until it takes a cue from Jazz and gets away from Europa. which is not at all what you might think he's gonna conclude.

https://books.google.com/books?id=7hjlAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA439&lpg=PA439&dq=that+so+called+jazz+music&source=bl&ots=5aiKlu1bvW&sig=rIcAjC16FoFcYgLp616gziYkHxE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitn4qo6P7SAhUS9WMKHVLBDh0Q6AEIQTAI#v=onepage&q=that%20so%20called%20jazz%20music&f=false

ugh i am terrible at linking to google book stuff. sorry. you'll find it.

"Boy, maybe, but that whole entry reads like the definition of 'backhanded compliment.'"

that's the thing though. for him to say ANYTHING good about you was pretty huge. but it could come with a lot of slander too. though i do see his point about al hirt.

DAMN. is a grab-you-by-the-throat declaration that’s as blunt, complex, and unflinching as the name suggests.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/damn/id1223592280

Kendrick. Shy Kendrick. Mouthy Kendrick. Bars and cars and you-get-yars. Like a doctor come to take the pulse of a nation, Kendrick has declared you fit to be funky. New music for new times. Kendrick.

I bet the booklet in this Modern Jazz Quartet 40th anniversary box set is great. (I'm listening to it on Spotify to decide whether I want to bring a physical copy into my home. There are copies for $20 plus shipping on Discogs.)

https://open.spotify.com/album/2nc1PR7xnJVKNQP0fceDRn

Just picked up the Jazz West Coast compilation from 1955, and it's a doozy:

While it is interesting to speculate as to whether most of these musicians can be grouped into a musical school of thought, that is not one of the limitations that was placed on selection.
...
But the task of definitive summation is left to later years or less biased observers. It is hoped that by disclaiming any restrictions of School we may bypass much of the clamor about presumptuous inclusion of musicians commonly associated with other areas.
...
This wide range was possible because a significant portion of the important musicians are part of the Pacific Jazz fold, and because contractual barriers to the inclusion of other jazzmen were bridge by an understanding on the part of companion companies as to the importance of a validly representative collection of the local output.

I do love reading these, and find most of them pretty informative, but pretty often they're also unintentionally hilarious. There's a desperate plea in there that this is serious, dammit, which just doesn't age as well as the music. I mean, the passive voice is fine for scientific journal articles, but these guys are writing about musical improvisation.

It's really bad writing, at least by the standards of "On Writing Well" or (name your favorite style guide). High-school students write that way, before they've learned how to communicate more clearly and effectively.

I mean, my god -- that final sentence is like an endless string of prepositional phrases.

There's a jazz critic I've known for many years who writes exactly like that, and as a bonus, whenever he's got the choice between two adjectives, he'll opt for the more obscure, Cormac McCarthy-esque of the two. It's really, really fucking annoying - he might be the single most affected prose stylist I've ever come across, and it's not like chopping your way through his sentences will ultimately yield some great insight into the music.

Kendrick. Shy Kendrick. Mouthy Kendrick. Bars and cars and you-get-yars. Like a doctor come to take the pulse of a nation, Kendrick has declared you fit to be funky. New music for new times. Kendrick.

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Friday, April 14, 2017 7:53 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haha, just seeing this now.

Did we have a thread for those 1970s copy-heavy music magazine ads where it would start like "Tangerine Dream doesn't want you to get high before listening to their music. The music alone will get you high enough"? I feel like there's some overlap here.

It's really bad writing, at least by the standards of "On Writing Well" or (name your favorite style guide). High-school students write that way, before they've learned how to communicate more clearly and effectively.

― i’m still stanning (morrisp)

sometimes obfuscatory bureaucratese is what's called for

seldom in jazz liner notes, mind

Did we have a thread for those 1970s copy-heavy music magazine ads where it would start like "Tangerine Dream doesn't want you to get high before listening to their music. The music alone will get you high enough"? I feel like there's some overlap here.

Vintage seventies (or sixties and eighties) magazine ads for albums

pulled out “quiet nights” and found this classic opening paragraph to the liner notes:

The nineteenth century French painter Eugène Delacroix once observed: "Talent does whatever it wants to do. . . . Genius does only what it can." So it is with Miles Davis—Miles the man and Miles the dedicated and instinctive musician. An aura of moody mysteriousness has been planted around Miles by writers and critics who desperately try to put the paradoxical pieces into place. But to the fiercest and only critic that matters to him—Miles himself—all is clear: "I am one thing, a musician; I only can do one thing, play my horn."

Yes, good riddance to all that and thank god we are living in the golden age of music criticism in which we are always kept abreast of who threw shade at who on twitter

i wouldn't want to do without 60s jazz liner notes for the typography alone

If someone on Pitchfork could shout out Eugène Delacroix while discussing musician Twitter shade that’d really be the dream, though

geez lighten up, paul

sorry. Over the years I've enjoyed and learned a lot from the kind of music writing being ridiculed in this thread. Sure, there's a lot of purple prose, but there's also genuine passion for the subject(s), good information and deep analysis. 50s / 60s liner notes were definitely instrumental in my learning to love jazz.

totally agree- one thing I have always loved is the feeling of reportage coming from them when you consider how short the turnaround time between recording and release could be

Yes! And those writers were in many cases well acquainted with the artists, many of whom likely approved of those (frequently hagiographic) essays.

I've enjoyed my share of these things. But it's weird saying Miles isn't talented.

the critic paradoxically continues

In this album, as in all his performances, Miles is an artist whose main concern is for the artistic. He has a fine ear, is a musician's musician, and knows what he is doing each minute. And yet, with his high sophistication of style and well-disciplined direction of talent, Miles still speaks with a simplicity to which a child can respond. A nine-year-old girl, after listening to one of his records for a moment, quipped, "That's Miles Davis!" How did she know? "Because it sounds like a little boy who's been locked out and wants to get in."

> the feeling of reportage

were some of these guys actually "reporters" and not "critics" because they sure refer to "critics" as some outside group... in basically every one of these things

I think they just mean other critics

That nine-year old girl was Ken Tynan's daughter, iirc. At least, it was in his profile of Miles that I first read the line.

Unrelated, but this got a laugh out of me yesterday, from an LP by vibraphonist Gary Burton

...a collection of nine of the loveliest tunes ever written as interpreted by one of the foremost singers of our time. Singer? Where's the singer? Listen, he's right there, front and center...

WHAT, you say??

Gary Burton is a singer. It just happens that his voice is the vibraphone

Touché, 60s jazz album liner notes. Touché.