How is it?
Reviews from the jazz media have been generally favourable, those from readers equally so.
Click on those headings to read extracts from these reviews and comments.

However, as the following article shows, at the end of the writing process I experienced a mixture of relief that it was off my desk, and trepidation as to how it would be received ...

How Many Notes?

I’ve spent much of the past few weeks dealing with the final editing problems of my new book, the jazz composer, moving music off the paper. Publication is set for early May and, as always when a large project is ready to leave the desk, I’m feeling a mixture of relief and trepidation. Relief that it’s all over, and trepidation about how it will be received
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It seems as if I’ve been working on the book for ever, and in a way I have as it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that this is a summing up of my life’s work. One strand is the conviction that jazz and jazz composition deserve to be recognised as an art as worthy as any other of public support (in both senses of the phrase). Another is that there are many highly praised jazz composers who, frankly, don’t deserve their reputation. They are writing what I call grey music – music that lacks the colour and imagination of the three exemplars of the art: Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans. The third strand, hinted at in this blog’s title, is what it is that makes a good jazz composition work:

‘[S]imple though it is, ‘C-Jam Blues’ has inspired many great jazz performances. In fact it could be argued that ‘C-Jam Blues’ is the epitome of the perfect jazz composition. It suggests and fulfils the main purpose of the genre: the provision of a strong and memorable framework which reflects the composer’s thinking, while stimulating and informing the improviser, who, ideally, is inspired without being inhibited. That statement, with one important proviso, is as relevant to a long complex piece as it is to a very simple blues.
The proviso is, that even though the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic material of the tune stay essentially the same, and even though the structure of the long complex piece may remain, the performances will have been, and should continue to be, essentially different.’

As for trepidation, I’m aware that there are some statements in the book that are somewhat contentious. For example:
‘Listening to soloists as diverse as Barney Bigard, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, one can easily hear that there are different styles of improvising, different languages. In varying degrees these are all still in use today… But one style dominates, which raises some interesting and important questions. Why does bebop, whose historical period was more than half a century ago, or, to put it another way, should have been, by all historical precedents, over, finished, half a century ago, still play such a dominant role in the music? A dominant role that, in many ways, goes against the spirit of the music.’
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‘The Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra, now known as The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra aided by Nestico’s work with Count Basie from 1970 to 1984, was the starting point for much of today’s generally dull big band writing.’
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‘Thelonious Monk[’s] … place in the pantheon of jazz composers is secure. Pantheon or not, I must confess that, for some reason, his work has always been a blind spot for me. I can appreciate that his pianistic touch is very different from many others, but I find his playing, and his tunes, too dry, too ‘quirky’ for my tastes.’

Those comments are of course expressions of my opinions, opinions formed through many years of involvement in jazz and jazz composing. I realise that they won’t be acceptable to many of my readers, but it’s my book and, obviously, I want to air the matters I feel strongly about. However, I am more than prepared to argue out these points or any other aspects of the book. Please contact me via the Contact Form.

Happily most of the reviews were favourable, but there was one I took exception to, and which led to an attack on me for something I hadn’t done...

Serious Concerns

The first official review of the jazz composer book is now out – in the June 2009 issue of the newly revived Jazz Journal - and frankly I’m somewhat disappointed. Which may seem a strange reaction in face of what was a generally good review, but I’m afraid it lives up to the criticisms I made of the whole business of jazz criticism in the book itself.
My point is that no real assessment of my argument went on. In the book I say that there are things we should look at closely in present day jazz and jazz composition, such as why certain people, certain styles, are popular, and why many creative artists from around the world are not known about. To do this I had to name them, and the reviewer, John Robert Brown, formerly of Leeds College of Music’s jazz department, has some fun listing most of them, but apart from a passing reference to Sydney Bechet and Charles Fox, he failed to list those I do like and support to the hilt. Jazz composers such as Duke, Gil and Mingus, of course, but also musicians and writers like Keith Nichols, Harry Beckett, Paul Grabowsky, Geir Lysne and many more. He ends with the comment ‘The Jazz Composer is not a book of instruction. Indeed it’s more a book of destruction. But what fun, how entertaining – and how welcome.’ On the surface that could be something for the publisher to use, but it presents the book in a totally wrong light.
For the record the jazz composer was never meant to be a book of instruction, certainly not in any formal ‘this is how to compose jazz’ sense, but a book which throws up some philosophical arguments to make people think, to open up discussion as to whether I’m right, to allow readers to get angry with what I think. Fortunately this seems to have been realised by some of my first readers and I’m hoping that later reviewers will take up the challenges I lay down.

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Following on from the review mentioned above, a subsequent letter to Jazz Journal contained a phrase which normally I would agree with: ‘Clinical analysis of chords is irrelevant if it ain’t got you-know-what’.
However in this context I find the phrase very annoying as
the letter-writer uses the phrase to sum up of what he thinks the book is about. His confusion arises from his misreading of the Jazz Journal review, almost half of which was used to criticise the way I had named a specific chord. This was a total waste of space in that the matter had no relevance in terms of the book and referred to just one chord in only eleven musical examples, most less than a page long, in a book of over 300 pages. For the record there are two ways of naming that chord: I chose one, the reviewer favoured another. Get a life!
But now that review is used as ammunition for a letter that uses ‘clinical analysis of chords’ as a stick to beat me with - odd because that approach is not in the book at all, and is in fact one of the many things the book argues against. Criticism of this kind bothers me not because it was part of a personal attack, but because a reviewer’s attempt to score a cheap point has led one reader, and possibly others, to think the book is something other than what it is. In a nutshell, this is part of the problem that jazz faces: good critics are few and far between and the less-good are becoming increasingly visible.

Bloody Marvellous

As an antidote to this I was delighted to see this comment from Ray Comiskey jazz critic for the Irish Times: Bloody marvellous, even though I wouldn’t say yes to everything in it.
For me that’s as close to an ideal review as I am ever likely to get: it’s enthusiastic, but tempered with the realisation that, like jazz, it’s a matter of personal taste whether you agree with it all.