Music Media Monthly

Best Music Writing 2011. Alex Ross, guest editor; Daphne Carr, series editor

Since 2000 this series has been a reliable source of well-written, sometimes quirky, sometimes brilliant essays originally written for a wide variety of magazines on “rock, hip-hop, jazz, pop, country and more,” as the earliest installments were subtitled. The latest in this annual anthology is something of a departure, with an even more inclusive goal, because the guest editor is Alex Ross, the esteemed classical music critic for the New Yorker. Most previous volumes had either a token single classical entry or none at all. Ross and series editor Daphne Carr have included among the 32 selections five on classical themes, ranging from the impact of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony on the musical world of 1805, by New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson, to a thoughtful review by Wendy Lesser of a contemporary string quartet performed, as per composer Georg Friedrich Haas’s instructions, in total darkness.

In his columns and books, Ross has proved to be an eclectic listener open to all genres. His introduction shows him at his erudite yet playful best, weaving Twitter, Justin Bieber and Schopenhauer into the first two pages, then proposing that in today’s world the musical mainstream his withered. “How do you map a micromusical landscape? Is there a universal language of criticism that can be spoken across the borders of genre?” he asks.

Best Music Writing 2011’s landscape is vast.  In the superstar galaxy, Vanessa Grigoriadis discerns the art behind Lady Gaga’s calculated rise; Chris Norris dissects the quest by will.i.am “to unite the largest possible audience over the broadest range imaginable;”  James Wood steps into a metaphorical phone booth, strips off his literary critic suit and reveals himself to be a rock and roll drummer, with an obsessive’s dazzling riff on what made Keith Moon great.

There are astute looks at jazz, hip-hop and the rest. Joe Hagan examines the diaries that singer Nina Simone left behind, revealing her losing battle with depression.  Jonathan Bogart’s deep dive into “TiK ToK” by white songwriter-rapper Ke$ha, Nitsuh Abebe’s exploration of blackness and CocoRosie, and Jessica Hopper’s  take on M.I.A. are just three of this collection’s provocative pieces about women who rock.  In the prose equivalent of a novelty record, there is a Washington Post article on a local wedding singer, which tells much about changing culture and social mores.

Among my personal favorites are two classical rants dressed to kill in social media: In a blog post, pianist Jeremy Denk positively bludgeons the blandness of most program notes.  And Marcia Adair’s #operaplot 2010 contest winners are so LOL that I feel impelled to quote one tweet in its entirety:

So I wrote this guy this EPIC love letter & he’s like “No thanks,” but now I’m married & rich & he’s all “OMG I LURV U!!” WTF? [Eugene Onegin, by Daniel John Kelley]

Ross writes that “we didn’t look for articles by and of insiders; we wanted writerly seductions.” Count me among the seduced.

Best Music Writing 2011, Alex Ross, Guest Editor, Daphne Carr, Series Editor. Da Capo Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780306819636. 311 pages. Paperback.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

Inclusive is almost too weak an adjective to describe Will Hermes’ kaleidoscopic history, subtitled “Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever.” The years under review are 1973 to 1977, during which new forms of music erupted and thrived in the city even as it sank, weighted down by crime, grime and dysfunctional subways, into near-bankruptcy. ”For a kid growing up then, it was pretty dispiriting,” writes Hermes, then a teenager living in Queens, an “outer borough” that is a subway ride from Manhattan.

But Hermes, a Rolling Stone critic and NPR contributor, wants to set the record straight for anyone who still believes the period — “post-Aquarian revolution, before punk and hip-hop begot the new age — was a cultural dead zone.” While other books (most notably Just Kids by Patti Smith) have covered some of the same territory, this is the first  book I’ve seen that presents a full-length chronological account, meticulously footnoted, with an invaluable discography and bibliography.

Promising a “telescopic, panoramic, superhero vision,” Hermes focuses not just on lower Manhattan, where the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls paved the way for Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and punk rock, but on uptown and the Bronx, in African-American communities and el barrio, in lofts filled with new jazz and in outdoor parks where young men drew crowds simply by jacking their sound systems into municipal streetlight outlets.

Hermes explores the different strands of salsa, soul, disco, rap, new jazz, jazz fusion, rock and r&b as they played out across the city. He shows how young white artists downtown such as Tom Verlaine, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young and others cross-pollinated what was happening at now-legendary venues like the Mercer Arts Center, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. He is terrific in placing others – Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, the Fania All Stars, Eddie Palmieri – at the forefront of change. He also pays homage to key DJs, critics and newspapers like the Village Voice and Soho Weekly News that were vital to spreading the news from the underground .

Like Alex Ross, Hermes has big ears. Just about the only music slighted are Broadway musicals (not that many readers will care; I didn’t) and home-grown mainstream pop and rock performers. Some artists, like Kiss and Paul Simon, rate a passing nod; others, like Billy Joel, do not. This is a quibble, however. Hermes vividly recreates a world in which New Jerseyans like Smith and Bruce Springsteen could live their dream in the great metropolis across the Hudson, where jazz labels took chances on avant-gardists like Anthony Braxton and David Murray and where every musician seemed to be doing something interesting the night of the 1977 blackout.

The book, whose title comes from a Talking Heads song, is a headlong rush backward to a consequential age, told in a colorful style that will keep you turning the pages even if you never heard Celia Cruz live. Will Hermes will make you wish you had.

Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever By Will Hermes. Faber and Faber Inc., 2011, ISBN-13: 9780865479807, 368 pages. Hardcover.

– Grace Lichtenstein

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona

Conductors, given their highly visible roles in symphony and opera come in two basic and opposing flavors: the humanists/persuaders (Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Mitropoulos) and the autocrats/high priests/maestros (Szell, Toscanini, Reiner). Riccardo Muti belongs in the first category. Reading Muti’s autobiography, it seems likely that two factors contributed to forming his temperate approach to music making. First, there is his southern Italian birth in the affable town of Molfetta, near Naples and below the Gargano Peninsula on the Adriatic. Second, as primarily an opera conductor, Muti has had to acquire (or, if the proclivity is natural, to tap into) those people skills that are necessary for effective collaboration with volatile opera singers. The result is a conductor of wide interests – a leader with a philosophical, positive outlook capable of inspiring his musicians to attain transformational levels of performance.

Muti has held important guest posts in Europe and in America. The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy’s oldest music festival, focusing on opera; the London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival. Currently, Muti is the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony.

At age 70, Muti has had little in the way of high drama or conflict in his life, and his career path over 40 years shows a steady, upward trajectory to the highest conductorial perches. So is the book, then, simply a placid memoir, reflecting on the glories of an untroubled life and career? No. There’s much here to attract and hold the reader’s attention: reflections that impart the spirit of the man, with his ethical values, love for people and, surprisingly, his typically Italian brand of humor. While reading Muti’s book, I thought of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which reflect a stoic, self-effacing way of life. Here’s a prime example: according to Muti, “a maestro shouldn’t seek out the limelight, especially in the later part of his life. Once he’s had his career, he should withdraw from the media and try, as much as possible, to bring music to others so that he, ephemeral himself, doesn’t fall victim to the ephemeral nature of conducting.” Demonstrating his point, Muti has led concerts for prison inmates and at juvenile detention centers, conducted at Ground Zero for the families of 9/11 victims, and in Sarajevo at the conclusion of the Bosnian war.

A notable aspect of the book is its large selection of photos. Highlights include informal double portraits with England’s Queen Elizabeth II and with Pope John Paul II; Muti as child prodigy violinist; and Muti’s in triumphant performances at La Scala and in Vienna, Japan, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The afterword by Marco Grondona, a 43-page analysis of Muti’s conducting style, compares it to those of Schubert, Bellini and Verdi, among others, and makes for a rather extended postscript. Muti acolytes will love it, no doubt, as it pays tribute to the maestro, saying great things about Muti that the conductor, out of self-effacing humility, has not written. But because of this abrupt change in tone it makes for a strange and awkward stylistic volte-face.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words is recommended primarily for opera lovers, and will make a worthy addition to libraries with collections on conductors and opera.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona. Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8478-3724-3. 244 pages. Hardcover.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra

Jazz music and black-and-white art photography are quintessentially 20^th century art forms; both matured at the same time. By the early 1940s, the development of camera technology made hand-held field cameras like the press favorite Speed Graphic 4×5, along with relatively fast film, available for the first time to innovative photographers who loved jazz and were inspired to document the modern jazz scenes–mostly in midtown Manhattan’s jazz bistros, which featured legendary black musicians. The lasting legacy of these visual artists is a treasury of iconic musical imagery. The works of master photographers such as Herman Leonard, Gjon Mili, Allan Grant, William P. Gottlieb, William Claxton, Art Kane and others evokes glorious music from the 1930s through the 1960s that in many ways defines American culture in our mind’s eye and ear.

Benjamin Cawthra’s outstanding book Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz provides a window into the history of jazz and a perfect merging of jazz music and black-and-white art photography. It also illustrates both the gradual merging and eventual divergence of black and white cultures during the middle of the 20th century. As the author writes, “Over the thirty years from 1936-1965, the photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s… In making jazz visible, photographers visually equated blackness with jazz at important moments in the music’s stylistic development.”

Jazz lovers will appreciate and learn the backstory of the music as well, for Cawthra’s Blue Notes in Black and White is as much about the musicians themselves–Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many other seminal artists–as it is about the iconic photographs of them.

My only complaint is that the book should have contained a high quality portfolio section in the form of plates to represent the legendary photographs in their full glory. Instead, we get relatively few of the photographs and most only in half-page sizes and low resolution. Blue Notes in Black and White should really have been a coffee table book, to do justice to the photographic art. It’s for this reason that I cannot recommend it to photographers and students of black-and-white photography, which is a shame. I do highly recommend the book to libraries with extensive jazz collections and to lovers of jazz.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra. University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-03875-3. 343 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner