DJANGO REINHARDT AND THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF GYPSY JAZZ, Michael Dregni, et al., Denver, Speck Press, 2006, paperback, 208 pages, $25.

Reviewed by William J. Schafer

Following up on the success of his Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (2004), Michael Dregni has assembled a general survey of the lively jazz-string-band music often called "gypsy jazz." It is one of those books that is hard to deal with. Is it a coffee table book? A scrap book? A comprehensive encyclopedia-history? It has elements of all, especially copious illustrations, including photos, posters, album covers and every other kind of memorabilia, all stunningly reproduced in color.

However, the organization and order of the running text-commentary seem random or whimsical, and it is hard to sit down and read this like a book. It makes for fine browsing in a skip-around fashion, but it is only a skin-deep surface of the stories suggested by the pictures and documents. It does include a wide survey of the music and musicians, from the best-known to the most obscure, and it traces relationships of the gypsies who developed the music.

The Romany are a notoriously secretive and elusive people, so Dregni's inside information is invaluable in understanding where Reinhardt and all his kin came from and the music they played and recorded. It also includes a great deal of information and many illustrations of the guitars and amplifiers favored by Reinhardt and others. This is significant because the history of this kind of string jazz also implies a history of the electric guitar as it entered jazz. A major achievement of Django and the Hot Club of France Sextet was to highlight the guitar as a virtuosic solo instrument. Django was certainly one of a handful of giant jazz soloists in the 1930s and '40s, and his brand of jazz reached out across categories to a worldwide audience.

Dregni and his coauthors chose to extend the commentary long past the classic period of string jazz. Django was born in 1910 and died in 1953, but the half-century after his death has been filled with cohorts, relatives and imitators, from France across the planet. A detailed chronology of Django's life is appended, and there are individual chapters on other bands, players and fellow-travelers of the gypsy jazz movement. Most sketches are helpful in introducing a non-fan to this world of guitars, fiddles and accordions.

Some little chapters or features in the book dissolve into fannish gossip, like a tale of Django and the flowered boxer shorts worn by the Ellington band or bits on specific guitars, pick-ups and amplifiers. But the biographical details on the followers of Django are informative and condensed enough to absorb easily. For hardcore gypsy jazz fans, this is probably too much of a primer, but for general jazz readers or those simply interested in a variety of music, this is a good way to get a grip on a worldwide phenomenon. In the era of the Internet and highly visual text-display, this is probably the best introduction for younger readers to a music that is substantially available on CD (or download) and which always exerts a strong appeal for new listeners.

LIVING WITH JAZZ, by Dan Morgenstern, edited by Sheldon Meyer, Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2004, $35.

Reviewed by Duncan P. Schiedt

If ever I had a bone to pick with Dan Morgenstern, it might be a gentle chiding about not having had this book published years ago. At a time when jazz books, while not exactly dominating the market, seem to come along in a reasonably steady flow, too often at the hands of lesser writers, it seems incredible that this man's immense output over many decades has not previously been collected and given hard-cover life. But thanks to a couple of enterprising editors and Morgenstern fans, namely Sheldon Meyer and Robert Gottlieb, the idea began to take shape. Morgenstern himself, as always heavily involved in jazz projects, needed help, even as he continued to expand his own voluminous oeuvre.

Sheldon Meyer, a former executive with Oxford University Press who has shepherded many a fine jazz manuscript into print, worked with Morgenstern in reducing the mass of published work into a manageable selection, then helped provide a presentation that would give readers a sense of order as they progress through the essays, the reviews, the analyses, the anecdotes and the sheer history that make up this book.

The book is a long one, 700 pages, and one should not expect to devour huge chunks at any one sitting, tempting though it may be to do so. At one point, Morgenstern advises us not to listen to too much of a certain musician's work. Like discretion at the dinner table, Living With Jazz works best in small bites.

As it turns out, the opening section is a feast of Armstrong and Ellington pieces. Some 125 pages are devoted to these two men, enough for a separate book. I found myself enjoying these intensely personal recollections, but at the same time I kept glancing ahead to see when we could get to the next subject. Fans of these two men will no doubt disagree, but the table of contents surely whets the appetite for what is yet to come, and one can get a little impatient.

The book reflects the breadth of Morgenstern's unique contributions to jazz literature. He cannot easily be categorized, for he may be a reviewer today, a critic tomorrow, a historian the next day, and a consultant the day after, not to mention his continuing job as Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. Most of these hats are visible in the collection. You don't have to get very far into this book to know a few things about Dan Morgenstern. It is immediately apparent that he listens and that what he hears is quickly processed in ways that most of us cannot fathom. For us to parse a musical performance is to listen to a recording repeatedly until we get a sense of how all the elements have come together. Morgenstern's listening, from long practice, seems to have made him aware of these elements virtually at the first hearing.

His analytical approach is thorough, but one senses the emotional responses lying behind the succinct descriptions. He has his favorites, and they are occasionally in plain view on his sleeve, and not necessarily because he is creating a set of liner notes for an album. As a long-time editor of Down Beat, Morgenstern's opportunities to cover events were manifold, and his readers were the beneficiaries. This book, revisiting his work at that magazine among other outlets, reminds us of what we no longer have, and how one man's perceptions can help us experience along with him recollections of precious moments. Take, for example, his all-too-brief description of the landmark 1957 telecast, The Sound of Jazz. It colors for the mind the indelible images we have grown used to from the scratchy black and white kinescope...Morgenstern's apt words about one highlight: "Lester Young's fey and beautiful chorus." Equally expressive in another context is this: "Basie is like a coiled spring; (Buddy) Rich is the spring uncoiled." About Harry Carney: " makes all other baritone saxophones sound like hoarse children." And at one low ebb, Roy Eldridge "received the graduate diploma degree of the working musicians -- he was stranded."

Dan Morgenstern is a man of long experience who has listened with an open mind to nearly everything that has come along in jazz. He does not hesitate to tell it as he sees it, but it is obvious that in print he would rather praise than punish. But flare-ups do occur, notably in his reaction to some statements in James Lincoln Collier's Armstrong book, Leonard Feather's remarks about early Ellington, and Max Harrison's failure to properly appreciate Vic Dickenson, a brief aberration.

A marvelous series of profiles occupies the midsection, and there are notes on the Smithsonian's Hot Chocolates album, discography, jazz and dance, and a lengthy piece on Milt Gabler, itself part of a monumental project in which Morgenstern took on the reviewing of the entire Commodore Records output, track by track, with cogent comments on the principal soloists, notable ensembles, and comparisons of issued sides with the many alternate takes! This all is part of a trio of boxed LP sets comprising over 52-sided discs as issued by Mosaic Records. Though this treatment of the Commodores was not included in the book, one can only imagine the sheer magnitude of the task. And Morgenstern did the same for another massive reissue project -- everything on Keynote. Is this superhuman or what!

Dan Morgenstern has never undertaken the writing of a history of jazz, but in this collection he has come close, and this is the way one reader, at least, likes his history.



June 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.