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Jazz Encyclopedia

Richard Cook

(Penguin, 694pp., £30)

jazz-encyclopediaI have a minor interest to declare in Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia (Penguin, 694pp., £30): I proofread it.

Beginning with Juhani Aaltonen, ‘one of the foremost Finnish modernists’, and concluding with boogie-woogie maestro Axel Zwingenberger, Cook applies his dispassionate, critical eye to everyone from Baby Dodds to Barbara Dennerlein, Lil Armstrong to Lynne Arriale, taking in the odd record company, critic and musical subgenre on the way.

Those familiar with Cook’s Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (written with Brian Morton) will know what to expect: decided opinions on the music imbued with the author’s extensive knowledge and admiration of jazz in all its myriad forms, enlivened by occasional flashes of deadpan wit.

To take a couple of entries not entirely at random (being on figures with whom most Vortex visitors will be familiar), Cook has this to say about Billy Jenkins: ‘a master of English absurdity, as well as a thoughtful and ingenious musician … his music could in some ways be seen as a jazz-oriented equivalent of such post-modern English rock music as Blur and The Fall’; and this to say about Howard Riley’s solo piano playing: ‘flinty, bonily resilient music with a northerner’s distrust of swank and an extensive range of approaches codified by a trenchant imagination that always wants to get to the heart of the matter … there is no other British pianist whose music is so free of cliché and capable of turning up fresh material, even after decades of intensive work in the improvisation field’.