t.surfer: yes, I was trying to keep my opinions out of the way when listing starting-points for the novice listener–hence my naming of an Ella Fitzgerald album (not, admittedly, from the Songbook cycle or the live concerts that yielded showy performances like “Mack the Knife” & “How High the Moon”, but instead the much simpler & lovelier Pure Ella disc). – I’m not sure we’re in great disagreement, to judge by your distinction re: her later, often exaggerated & showy scat singing, & the earlier work, especially the 1950s Verve albums. I can only suggest that the listener get a bunch of albums & compare–an interesting exercise in any case. Useful for instance to run Fitzgerald’s Gershwin up against Chris Connor’s rival Gershwin disc for Atlantic (can’t conduct a comparison myself right now, not having a copy of the Fitzgerald nowadays in my collection). I was recently reading Gene Lees’ Singers and the Song II (a book that has the distinction of boasting on the back it is a “new and expanded edition” despite its being exactly the same length as the old one–a feat achieved by excising half the original book). In an admiring essay on Fitzgerald (which by the way shows that while I do question her ability to infuse lyrics with expressiveness & emotional depth, she was not an airhead in real life: there’s much useful interview material with her in the piece) Lees makes my case inadvertently:
Part of my polemic stems from annoyance at the assumption that “real” jazz singing involves scat. In fact, a number of the singers on my original list (Christy, Connor, Holiday, Merrill) do not scat at all to the best of my recollection. – Conversely, I recall the title of Lees’ essay–“Sweetest Voice in the World”–& think that this precisely describes my problem with Fitzgerald as an interpreter: sweetness is a quality I can only take in certain contexts & certain doses, & that’s why I’ve often got more out of singers with more idiosyncratic voices & approaches.
In any case, that’s a judgment that listeners may or may not go along with. My own distrust of the kind of Ken Burns glorification of a select cadre of players is precisely about how it preempts more various & perhaps wavering or equivocal judgments on the part of listeners. Anyone interested in jazz singing should certainly make Fitzgerald’s acquaintance. But I would also urge wide familiarity with many other jazz singers also.
Your tellin’ me!!! I spend sooooo much money on music. I’m usually not into impulse purchases, just when it comes to music. At $20 a CD/Record it gets pretty rough when you have a list almost a thousand artists long!!! I can walk into almost any music store and find at least 10 albums I want. Ouch! I gotta regulate my trips to theses places. And to E-bay.
Collecting vinyl makes it even trickier. Usually records are limited issue. You have to get it when you find it, or it may be gone forever.
Amen. Think of all the poor assholes out there who bought up all the Louis Armstrong catalogue because Burnsie brought him up fifty times in each episode, but who will never hear Henry “Red” Allen or Frankie Newton, two stunningly talented New Orleans trumpeters who had the misfortune to be Satchmo’s contemporaries…
Another unsung (snicker) lady vocalist to look for is Lee Wiley.
dalovindj, I assume as a DJ you have a CD burner, no? If so, check out http://www.emusic.com . $9.95/month gets you unlimited downloads, and they have a large and growing jazz collection. In the last month, I have downloaded tons of material from:
Bix Biederbecke
Louis Armstrong
Dave Brubeck
Art Blakey
Max Roach
Kenny Burrell
Wayne Shorter
Cindy Blackman
Dizzy Gillespie
Thelonius Monk
Duke Ellington
Lester Young
and several other artists. It really is worth the money–rather than $20 per CD, you can get all the music you want for half of that.
I want to defend Ken Burns here. Yes, Jazz has many flaws. But it simply was never intended to be an encyclopedic discussion of Jazz. I suppose he could’ve talked about Red Allen or Frankie Newton, but there influence is nowhere near that of Louis Armstrong, not just in Jazz itself but culturaly and socially. Editorial decisions needed to be made and certainly different folks would’ve done it differently. Personally I thought Diz got short-shrift with respect to Bird and Thelonious Monk should’ve been given much wider importance. But overall, I thought it did an excellent job in it’s purpose. And if someone goes out and buys some Louis Armstrong because of the series and never knows of Red Allen it is still a very good thing.
Tretiak: I can’t really comment on the Burns series. I didn’t even have a TV until recently, & now that I do haven’t got cable, so the only bits of it I saw were snatches at my parents’ house. What I would say is that no-one’s saying that the series could possibly have incorporated every artist of note; but it is a history, one with a distinctive ideological slant (most famously in its deletion of most of the last 40 years of the music’s history), but one that will have enormous hegemonic force because (e.g.) of its use as an educational tool, & its multimedia ubiquity as TV series, series of videos/DVDs, CDs, coffeetable book, &c.
I can only say that any project whose 5-CD overview omits tracks under the leadership of, say, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett & Lee Konitz in favour of Grover Washington Jr. will justly earn the contempt or suspicion of many who actually know something about the music, including me.
However, this is perhaps not a debate for this thread; or at least those who are more acquainted with the entire series than I am will be more worth listening to. But I thought I would urge somehting else: rather than focussing so much on the purchase of recordings I’d suggest that a much better way of learning about jazz is simply to go out to a few concerts, assuming you’re in an urban centre with a decent music scene. The worst effect of the Burns project will be if people merely learn to treasure old recordings rather than what is happening now. Also, good live performances can often be more accessible than recordings–I’ve often taken people with little or no background in contemporary or avantgarde jazz to events (e.g. Georg Graewe, Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Dave Douglas…though I’ve also dragged my sister to Ralph Sutton & Kurt Elling), & they’ve often found the music immediately engaging. One can learn a lot at concerts. I once went to a concert by Phil Woods, who was in a grumpy mood & visibly hated being there (not that the audience noticed: they applauded for an encore, which he refused to perform). So I went instead to see a bunch of students perform in a cafe: it was sometimes shaky but much more enjoyable. A similar story might be told about a heavily hyped but in the event boring & lazy concert of neo-hardbop by Jesse Davis I saw this summer; walked out on it with a friend, & we grabbed a burger & instead caught a completely unpublicized gig in a hotel bar by Ray Anderson, sitting in with a few local musicians. It’s one of the best concerts I’ve attended for years.
& I’d also suggest that listening to a good radio programme is essential. I also like alphabetized reference books (rather than marmoreal histories along the line of the Jazz volume or Ted Gioia’s History)–Cook & Morton, or the Carr/Priestley/Fairweather Rough Guide despite its idiosyncrasies.