Cats Of Any Color: Jazz, Black And White
by Gene Lees

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• ISBN13: 9780306809507
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Cats Of Any Color: Jazz, Black And White

Book Review: Meditation of Jazz and Race
Summary: 4 Stars

They're very readable, although I do get a little annoyed at times by Lees' short, punchy newspaper style, with two and three word sentances and one-sentance paragraphs. It's a technique that is best used very sparingly. Lees does do a superb job of recreating conversations, showing that he has a marvelous ear for the rhythms and conventions of spoken English.

The unifying theme through all these pieces is Gene Lees' concern with the role race played in jazz, whether the early racism that kept Black jazz musicians out of the limelight, or the contemporary racism of people like Stanley Crouch who proclaim jazz to be Black music. What puts Lees' essays a cut above others who have written on this topic is that he goes beyond the simple enumerating of players and their opinions; he has a real musicologist's interest in the history of jazz and popular music.

One piece, an extended profile and interview Dominique d Lerma is devoted to breaking the stereotypes of the earliest jazz music. If you watched Ken Burns' history of jazz you could be forgiven for thinking that jazz came from ill-educated, poor Southern blacks. de Lerma emphasizes, for example, the role of conservatory-trained Black musicians who integrated the harmonies of the European composers they studied into the popular music of the times, and the role of the great Black music publisher W. C. Handy in popularizing this music.

The last essay is specifically devoted to Wynton Marsalis, a man with marvelous technique and shallow opinions, who refuses to admit that any white musician has contributed anything to jazz, thus bringing the debate full circle. Marsalis is a trumpter with a brilliant classical technique who unfortunately has been elevated in recent years to the position of being the modern savior of jazz by the efforts of Burns and Stanley Crouch despite his not having much of anything original since his early days as an up-and-comer with Art Blakey's band. Unfortunately he has come to be viewed as a major figure and authority in jazz by outsiders, despite being generally ignired as disparaged by most jazzers.

The real pity of attitudes like Marsalis' is that they lose sight of the fact that while Jazz certainly had its origins in Black musicians, it has always been as much an American music form as a Black form, and that today it is an international form that transcends boundries of either race or color. The greatest musicians have always ignored artificial boundries, and many of the great bands of the post WW-II always included musicians of all races. It takes nothing away from Ray Brown to say he was influenced by Scott LaFaro, or that Miles Davis was strongly influenced by his close association with Gil Evans. (Miles, responding to a comment by Marsalis that Miles was never Marsalis' idol, reportedly told him "without me, you'd be all 'Flight of the Bumblebee'")

For that matter, in the end it becomes ridiculous to talk about race. Horace Silver, as Lees notes in one interview, Black, Native American, and Portuguese ancestors; his father spoke Portuguese. Does that make him a white musician? A Black one? A European? Charles Mingus had a similarly mixed ancestry. Does the fact the he was perhaps a quarter African make him less Black in the eyes of Marsalis, and thus less of a musician?

There's a lot in this book to think about long after you put it down. As you might be able to tell from reading the above, I'm still thinking about it.

Summary of Cats Of Any Color: Jazz, Black And White

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