IF ONLYT PETER GURALNICK LIKED JAZZ (via Mike Daley):

All That Jazz (Terry Teachout, March 2007, Commentary)

Rare are the writers willing to undertake large-scale histories aimed at a general audience. Yet when such books are engagingly and accessibly written, sufficiently comprehensive, and animated by a strongly personal point of view--as are H.G. Wells's The Outline of History (1920), E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art (1950), and Paul Johnson's Modern Times (1983)--they can become both popular and influential.

When it comes to jazz, comparatively few attempts have been made to write a general history that fulfills these requirements, and only a half-dozen such books have appeared since World War II. The most ambitious of them, Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz, was not widely noticed in this country on its original release in 2001. But it has now been reissued in an expanded and extensively revised edition. At over 800 closely packed pages, this is the most detailed historical survey of jazz yet to be published.

Like all such books, A New History of Jazz has its share of errors and other flaws, and its length will no doubt prevent it from being taken up by the public at large. Yet Shipton, an English broadcaster and musician whose previous books include biographies of Dizzy Gillespie (1999) and Fats Waller (1988), has done more than any previous commentator to cut through the thick underbrush of unsubstantiated opinion and provide a clearly written, factually trustworthy account of jazz's complex and controversial history. If A New History of Jazz is not the ideal single-volume chronicle for which lovers of this music have been waiting, that is in part because jazz itself is peculiarly resistant to such concise treatment. [...]

As Shipton explains, popular musicians throughout America, many of whom had "little or no first-hand exposure to New Orleans musicians," were experimenting at the turn of the 20th century with new styles of dance music in which syncopation played a prominent part. It was out of this widespread musical ferment that jazz emerged, and while it appears to have first taken recognizable shape in New Orleans, it was being played in other cities around the same time or shortly afterward.

What was true in the beginning remained true thereafter. Jazz has been played in many different ways throughout its history, and, as Shipton makes clear, there has never been a single "authentic" style conclusively superior to all others. Louis Armstrong is the only figure whose stylistic innovations achieved anything like universal currency, and Armstrong himself, for all his extraordinary originality, was only one of a number of musicians who helped shape the language of early jazz. Accordingly, Shipton presents his history not as a lineal succession of great men but as an overlapping series of stylistic movements, each of which he describes with a catholicity of taste unusual among jazz commentators.

Time and again Shipton steers clear of the errors that have tripped up so many of his predecessors--especially those who have insisted on viewing jazz through a racial prism. White ensembles and players like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman, and Woody Herman are taken as seriously and treated as fairly in A New History of Jazz as are Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie. Nor is this fair-mindedness limited to the case of white artists, as can be seen from Shipton's thoughtful discussions of figures whose popular success caused them to be inadequately appreciated by critics: among others, Cab Calloway, the John Kirby Sextet, and the Mills Brothers.

Above all, Shipton has a gift for crisp, vivid summary without which it is impossible to write an effective survey history--a gift rooted in the fact that while he is a performing musician, he has also spent much of his career working as a journalist. A case in point is his treatment of the sharply contrasting styles of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, the two most influential saxophonists of the swing era:

However brilliantly and rhapsodically Hawkins built his solos, such as on "Body and Soul," he usually did so by moving away from the composer's original melody as quickly as was practical to do so, after milking it for the dramatic effect of his opening statements, and then relying almost totally on the harmonic framework of the piece. Young, however, was much more of a melodist . . . and he preferred to superimpose the logic of his melodic lines over an underlying chord structure, even when those chords were more complex than his melodic ideas.

No less striking is the ease with which Shipton negotiates the great stylistic divide that separates pre- and post-1960 jazz. Most authors of survey histories in any field of art come to grief when writing about movements for which they feel no sympathy. Paul Johnson's Art: A New History (2003), for instance, is willfully, almost obsessively dismissive of modern art. In A New History of Jazz, by contrast, the avant-garde jazz of the 60's is described with a relish rarely to be found among performers who, like Shipton, have been closely identified with traditional jazz.