Bass Notes: Jazz in American Culture: A Personal View

Composer, arranger, and bassist Israels (Exploring Jazz Arranging) chronicles more than 50 years of the American jazz scene in this intimate and immersive career retrospective. Israels was born in 1936 New York City. After his parents’ divorce when he was four, his mother remarried, and in 1946 she moved the family to Cleveland, where Israels’s stepfather had landed a job directing the opera program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Steeped in musical culture since childhood (Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson were frequent guests of his parents), Israels’s love for jazz exploded when he enrolled in MIT in 1954 and began jamming with older musicians in Boston. He set about shaping a musical “system of aesthetics” that centered a “balance between the predictable and the unexpected.” Israels sketches a whirlwind career that took him from playing in jazz trios across Europe in the early 1960s; back to America, where jazz was giving way to folk; and subsequently into working partnerships with the likes of Paul Simon and Judy Collins. While Israels mourned jazz’s fall from cultural prominence, he concludes on a positive note, pointing to such venues as the National Jazz Ensemble, which has helped to reestablish the genre in the American consciousness. The result is a revealing peek into the life and work of an influential musician and an up-close history of a musical genre. (Dec.)