Blues Up and Down: Jazz, Race, and American Culture in Our Time

In the essays, articles and reviews collected here, critic Piazza (Blues and Trouble) looks at the state of jazz in the 1980s and 1990s. He examines the work of a few individual musicians--e.g., Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell--and discusses independent record companies, the Smithsonian Folkways legacy and a jazz festival sponsored by Club Med in Senegal. The essence of the book, however, is in Piazza's articles castigating critics who perpetuate the notion that jazz is about emotion, not art, and who revile jazz musicians engaged in exploring the jazz tradition with the intelligence and seriousness that characterizes artists in other spheres. He accuses these reviewers of not knowing enough about music to understand what jazz is, claiming they are on the defensive and can fight back only by disparaging trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whose confrontational attitude, he contends, has brought their inadequacies into the open, and young musicians who consider jazz an art form. Some of these thought-provoking but highly opinionated pieces have been published earlier in various periodicals. (Nov.)