Jazz (Npr Curious Listener's Guide)

Rating:
Summary: Tidy Survey But For Who?
Review: I'm not really a jazz fan so much as I'm a jazz listener.
It's just the kind of music I put on the radio when I'm
puttering around the house, since it's generally
good-natured, not as distracting as pop and rock, not as
sombre as classical. Jazz hepcats tend to amuse me:
"Man, you can dig it without gettin' dirty!"

However, over the decades I've still managed to pick
out jazz material I particularly like, and I'm curious
about the field. Loren Schoenberg's THE NPR CURIOUS

LISTENER'S GUIDE TO JAZZ sounded like it might help me
learn more about the background of the field, so I
picked it up.

However, it wasn't quite what I expected. The GUIDE TO
JAZZ is not really a historical survey of the field.
It does survey the origins of the music and provides
short musical biographies of the major players,
but it also describes various schools of jazz, provides
commentaries on famous performances, and recommends CDs
and websites.

The result seems to be closer to an exercise in jazz
criticism than in jazz history. This is not necessarily
a bad thing in itself, but it was often talking over my
head. This book also reflects its origins in National
Public Radio. Though I am deeply in my debt to NPR-PBS,
there is such a thing as "NPR-itis": bookish, too dry,
and a bit self-important -- and this book tends to suffer
from the syndrome.

I'm still not saying this is a bad book so much as I
am puzzled as to who its target audience is supposed to
be. It really seems to be targeted at a reader with
some level of formal musical background, the best fit
being a music student who is interested in expanding
his or her knowledge into the jazz idiom. A hardcore
jazz fan might like it, but might find it too brief
and prefer a more substantial item.

There is a lot of material in this book and I did
find interesting tidbits. For example, John
Coltrane admitted that his solos did sometimes go
on too long and told Miles Davis that he had trouble
figuring out when to stop. (Aha! I knew it!) Davis
replied: "Try taking the sax out of your mouth."

In any case, for myself and for other casual jazz
listeners a historical survey would be much more useful,
preferably backed up with a CD set. Another problem
with this book, or for that matter any book about
music, is that talking about particular performances
without being able to listen them is a bit silly, an
exercise in listening to someone ramble on about
something when you don't really know what he's talking
about. ("You lost me way back at the beginning.")

To its credit, this book does recommend the Ken Burns
JAZZ TV series and its companion book and I'm going to
look it up, though Mr. Schoenberg added that the jazz
community was generally critical of it as it was designed
for a popular audience. (Why does that not surprise me?)
I would also hope that NPR sees fit to publish their

excellent and lively JAZZ PROFILES radio series of jazz
biographies in book form one of these years.