Writing Jazz.(Review)

Edited by David Meltzer. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1999. [xix, 315 p. ISBN 1-56279-096-X. $16.95 (pbk.).]

David Meltzer's anthology Writing Jazz is decidedly not just another collection of jazz articles. Meltzer has hit upon a scheme that is sure to stimulate interest and, most likely, controversy as well. The plan is simple: present a collection of writings by white authors (Reading Jazz, ed. Meltzer [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993]) along with a companion volume of writings by black authors (Writing Jazz). Lest the division seem superficial or pointless, Meltzer provides a conceptual framework, implicit in the titles themselves. Reading Jazz reveals "the cultural colonization and reinvention of jazz as a white discourse," while "Writing Jazz represents African-American perceptions of jazz as a subject and practice" (p. xi).

Writing Jazz claims to be "the first comprehensive historical anthology of writings on jazz by African-American musicians, critics, writers, and poets" (dust jacket). Excerpts by more than one hundred contributors are organized into six chapters in loose chronological order. The chapters are framed by a "Pre-Text" and "Sub-Text" in which Meltzer interjects his own polemics in his rambling and poetic prose style. An extensive bibliography and an index of the anthologized material prove to be helpful additions to the volume.

Meltzer believes that jazz exemplifies racial division in the United States: "the line is drawn in the sand between white and black; implanted implacably as the Great Wall, divided, apart, where whites and blacks face each other tiptoeing to the ledge of a deep Grand Canyon whose bottom can't be fathomed. Only the musics arise" (p. xix). But writings by musicians themselves paint a different picture. Pianist Willie ("the Lion") Smith writes that "music does not stem from any single race, creed, or locality. It comes from a mixture of all these things" (p. 7). Saxophonist Sidney Bechet says that "no music is my music. It's everybody's who can feel it. You're here ... well, if there's music, you feel it then it's yours too" (p. 125). Duke Ellington speaks of George Gershwin's work as moving in "the same general direction" as his own (p. 148). Indeed, accounts by jazz musicians who were active in the 1930s and 1940s tend to support Scott DeVeaux's observation that "personal relations between blacks and whites w ere more collegial than in perhaps any other professional sphere of the time" (DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History [Berkeley: ...