The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8JH | Bookings 020 7254 4097 | Enquiries 020 7993 3643 | Email Info at Vortex

More book reviews

Read more of Chris Parker's book reviews.

CD reviews

The latest CD reviews by Chris Parker

Join the Vortex
email list

To receive monthly gig details, news and ticket offers.



RSS feeds

For news, gig and CD reviews and information about the club.

Click on the link below to get the subscribe address
Vortex news

For more informaton about RSS see the
RSS help pages

 

Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy

Peter Ind

(Equinox, 222pp., £16.99)

'There was nothing in my own background to suggest that I would go in the direction of jazz music played with rhythm. I had been kidded about my response to this rhythm as a child, as if it was my little joke and one day I would grow out of it, but this could not stop my enjoyment.' Thus Peter Ind, in his Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy (Equinox, 222pp., £16.99).

'I'm a white guy from the North of England writing about Harlem. It's like James Baldwin writing a play about ship-building on the River Tyne.' Thus Alan Plater, recalling the speech he made to the assembled (mainly black) cast of his Theatre Royal play, Rent Party, in his 'memoirs of a jazz-crazed playwright', Doggin' Around (Northway, 212pp., £6.99).

'He was an alienated American, a wandering Jew, a musician playing to empty houses on an endless foreign tour ' He was on permanent loan to Paris, like a painting in a museum.' Thus Mike Zwerin, reflecting on his 'years of exile' in Paris as a music journalist for the International Herald Tribune in his 'improvisational memoir', The Parisian Jazz Chronicles (Yale University Press, 227pp., £15.95).

The quotes point up a common thread running through many jazz-related memoirs: a slight sense of bewilderment at the power of a music, apparently rooted in a culture not the writer's own, to obsess, to dictate the course of a life, to illuminate, enliven and immeasurably enrich it.

In Peter Ind's case, this obsession led him, initially, to seize the chance granted by 'Geraldo's Navy' (in which UK players enlisted in liner bands so they could spend shore leave in jazz's Mecca, New York) to familiarise himself with the music first hand, and subsequently to emigrate to the USA, where he met and studied with the subject of his book, the great pianist Lennie Tristano.

Ind's book is in three parts: 'Lennie: The Man and His Music', which gives an insider's view of the New York scene in the late 1940s and 1950s; and the self-explanatory 'Lennie: A More Technical Consideration of Jazz Improvisation and His Legacy' and 'A Reconsideration of Lennie's Legacy'.

Packed with revealing anecdotes and pungent opinions, Jazz Visions is a deeply personal book with a clear, stated mission: to inform 'those who are curious about Lennie Tristano and his place in the evolution of jazz since the late forties'.

Unflinching in its treatment of such contentious areas as racial politics, critical distortions of the music, and what Ind sees as the contemporary malaise, the search for instant gratification, the book, while not faultless (it is designed for dipping into rather than straight-through reading, so contains a fair amount of repetition), does provide a valuable eye-witness account of an unjustly neglected figure and the legacy he bequeathed to jazz.

Alan Plater accounts for his love of jazz in this way: '[T]here are qualities in my work and, I guess, in my view of the world also found in jazz and the people who make the music: suspicion of authority, a taste for bleak jokes, respect for eccentricity, a reluctance to wear a tie, and a love of people who only flourish and bloom after dark.'

All these strands run through Plater's memoir, which is a compulsively readable, consistently entertaining and delightfully self-deprecating account of what he himself describes as 'forty-five years without a proper job'. His childhood in Jarrow and Hull, his half-hearted attempt at establishing a career in architecture, his falling into writing via a series of accidents, and his subsequent career as a BAFTA-winning playwright, journalist, broadcaster and 'teacher' (the quote marks are effectively his) are all described with the trademark Plater touches: laconic wit, an infectious delight in the occasional unexpected felicity thrown up by the incongruities of life, a persuasive passion for authenticity, honesty and integrity, a distrust of people 'acting on behalf of an institution [who] put on an imaginary uniform' to enable them to operate in a world where it is, Plater suggests, 'almost compulsory to be materialistic and cynical'. Illustrated by some extremely funny cartoons ('The Secret of a Happy Marriage' a particular personal favourite) and imbued with the humane wisdom that has made him famous, Doggin' Around is warmly recommended.

Mike Zwerin is a master of the art that conceals art; his pithy, pungent prose slips down a treat and, often, it is only on reflection or rereading that its many subtleties and depths reveal themselves. Taking up the story of his life where his Quartet memoir Close Enough for Jazz leaves off, the late 1980s, Zwerin improvises a series of highly entertaining yet thought-provoking solos on themes such as fatherhood, celebrity, musical integrity, drug-use, marriage and alienation.

His anecdotes, unsparing, occasionally downright scurrilous, but always (like Plater's) spiced with warmth and a broad tolerance for human frailty, are what make the book so immediately attractive (Dexter Gordon, Bob Dylan, Wayne Shorter, Kenny G, Chet Baker and Miles Davis are just a few of the dramatis personae), but (again as with Plater) it is Zwerin's mature reflections on such matters as the position of jazz in the cultural firmament, or the interplay of forces such as commercialism and artistic integrity, that make his book a genuinely enlightening as well as unequivocally entertaining read.

And the aforementioned bewilderment at the power of an art form apparently not rooted in the writer's own culture? The crucial word here is 'apparently', for reasons that might well become clear once I've read a book to be reviewed in our next, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880Á1935, which contests the notion that jazz took root in the UK solely as an extension or reflection of an American art form.