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

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.