Blue: The Murder of Jazz

The central argument of music critic Nisenson (Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest), that jazz is being smothered by a ""neoclassicist"" movement led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and critics Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray, is interesting and surely deserving of a book that carefully explores the implications of such a claim. Unfortunately, the author fails to accomplish this task. First, Nisenson's prose would get a low mark in composition class (""dancing through the harmonies of a tune like Fred Astaire would if he could play the saxophone""). The second failing of the book is Nisenson's adoption of the very rhetorical techniques he criticizes in Murray and Crouch. To discredit their attempts to create a jazz canon that includes only pieces that fit their narrow definition of jazz, based on concepts such as ""swing"" and, more controversially, race, Nisenson develops his own narrow definition that ""real"" jazz is based on the principles of improvisation and continuous development, and any backward-looking jazz--such as that performed by Marsalis--isn't ""authentic."" This view, perhaps as reactionary as the one he seeks to discredit, is continually reinforced with abstractions such as, ""[Ellington] understood the nature of jazz on such a profound level."" One finishes this book with the sense that jazz would hold its own if only critics would let the musicians play in peace. (Nov.)