Esi Edugyan: Half Blood Blues (2011)

Edition: Serpent's Tail, 2011
Review number: 1463

The treatment of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War is well known (even if a small minority of people claim that the Holocaust did not happen), but the knowledge that similar efforts were made to destroy other groups (such as gypsies and homosexuals) is less widespread. This novel is the story of three black men, jazz musicians, in Germany and then France as the war broke out and France was occupied. Jazz music was banned as degenerate by the Nazis, which makes them even worse in the eyes of the German state and its functionaries, One of the musicians, trumpeter Hiero, is actually German by nationality, so is even more unwelcome in the land of his birth. He is unable to get travel papers as easily as the others, who are Americans, and they end up making a recording named Half Blood Blues in a tiny studio in Paris, which, when discovered after the war, is acclaimed as a classic, along with Hiero being regarded as a jazz great tragically lost when he is arrested and taken to the concentration camps shortly after the session.

Half Blood Blues was nominated for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, but failed to win. Neither is a surprise to me. The novel has some truly brilliant writing, but my interest flagged in the middle. The background of wartime Europe is less interesting than the sections about jazz, and what it feels like to be a jazz musician is far more enthralling than the plot.

Although jazz has never been music which really spoke to me - I keep on trying, to see if I can pick up what others love about it so much - I have done a fair amount of musical improvisation. I can't claim to be very gifted at it, but on occasion it has just clicked, and when this happens while playing with others also "in the groove", it produces a euphoric feeling which is like no other I have ever felt and which I can never forget even though I rarely play now and never perform any more. In her descriptions of the session when the main characters jam with Louis Armstrong and in the Half Blood Blues session itself, Edugyan comes close to expressing that feeling in prose, and then goes on to nail the draining numbness and despair which comes to those who (unlike me) have been able to touch a vein of inspiration frequently enough to become professionals when they are unable to perform as well as they want: a feeling probably at the source of at least some of the drug habits which have plagued many famous jazz musicians.

It is the wartime aspects of the novel - the terrible choices which must be made, the lost companions, the betrayals - which work less well. However gifted Edugyan is at bring the experience of music making alive for the reader, she does not appear to be a thriller writer. The slackness of this side of the novel is why the middle parts drag.

While tempted to give a higher rating to this novel for the brilliance of its evocation of performance, I don't really think that Half Blood Blues can be rated higher than 6/10 overall.

Humphrey Lyttelton: The Best of Jazz (1999)

Originally published as Basin Street to Harlem (1978) and Enter the Giants (1984)
Edition: Portico, 2008
Review number: 1403

Jazz has always been something of a closed book to me. One of the reasons for this is that despite interest, I had no idea what was worth listening to, particularly given the minuscule selection available in a small provincial town with no proper record shop. So the subtleties of the jazz idiom, like those of, say, Indian classical music, largely passed me by. (I played in wind bands for most of the eighties, but the closest we got to jazz was Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra and, once, a Duke Ellington song.) The result is that much of it comes across as simultaneously lacking the harmonic inventiveness of classical music or the excitement and drive of rock music. On the other hand, I've always felt that I ought to appreciate jazz more, and the problem is knowing where to start. The most obvious starting point is compilations, but these are too often lazily organised around the easy to license, as a result becoming as representative as sixties pop compilations which suggest that the pre-fame Beatles track Ain't She Sweet is the band's best recording.

These days, it's easier to search out individual downloads, and it is for this that The Best of Jazz becomes an invaluable guide for the jazz novice. For the book is a series of essays on jazz greats with undeniable authority (for Lyttelton was a fine jazz trumpeter who knew many of the most famous stars of the genre personally). Each essay contains an anecdotal description of the subject's career and importance, and a detailed analysis of a representative track by the artist. Originally conceived as a guide to the early 78 rpm recordings, the format translates uncannily well to modern listening habits. As originally published, the first part, Basin Street to Harlem, describes the early history of jazz up to about 1930, concentrating on the three main centres of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. The second half, Enter the Giants, looks at the big figures of the thirties, from Louis Armstrong (who is the subject of three essays, and is the only artist to appear in both parts) to Roy Eldridge.

It is of course really difficult to describe music in words: a picture may be worth a thousand words, but a music clip is, well, priceless. This has two consequences for the book. Firstly, a little technical knowledge is needed to follow the descriptions of the performances. A knowledge of the notes of the musical scale and harmonic terms such as "diminished" - as would be obtained by learning basic guitar - is assumed. There are occasional references to piano keyboard layout as a means of explanation. Other terms, including jazz specifics such as "swing" are explained in the text; this is not always done on first appearance: the word "diatonic" appears in the first volume, but is only explained when it appears again in the second.

The second issue is basically that it will immensely aid enjoyment of The Best of Jazz to have access to listen to the analysed performances beforehand; being able to listen, with pause and rewind, while reading the discussions of the performances would be the ideal way to read this book. The songs would almost fit onto a single CD, I think - since some artists have several songs discussed, cutting their representation down to one each would do it. Because of their age, almost all of them over 75 years, it would be cheap to license the recordings. So it would seem to be a good piece of marketing to supply an accompanying CD, maybe as part of a deluxe edition. Searching Amazon suggests that no such CD exists: a missed opportunity.

Throughout Enter the Giants, references are made to a projected third volume, which was obviously planned in some detail. This never seems to have happened (again, I say this on the authority of being unable to find it on Amazon). To continue into postwar jazz would have made The Best of Jazz a useful reference on jazz history (though an index would also help achieve this!). As it is, The Best of Jazz is fascinating - probably even to people who know the genre well - and really good reading for the interested novice with some musical knowledge - 8/10.

Donald Clarke: The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (1995)

Published: Viking, 1995

What requirements are there for a history of "popular music"? In some ways, Clarke's work seems to fit the bill admirably. While he doesn't actually define what he means by the phrase, and discusses music which has never been all that popular with the general public, the book basically covers music from non-classical genres in the US from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. He talks briefly about British music in the eighteenth century, and again looks at the UK in the prelude to the British invasion of the mid sixties, and ends with some discussion of later trends (of which more later) and a couple of paragraphs about the music of the rest of the world, but actually he what Clarke is looking at - and what the history of popular music effectively boils down to - is the way that the modern music industry developed, from the first publishers of sheet music for a mass market. In musical terms, the body of work produced by this industry most deserves the label "popular", as a major part of the American cultural domination of the modern world. This doesn't just include music which is popular at the time, but should reasonably also discuss the music which influences popular genres or is not yet popular (such as the blues), and popular music which is no longer primary in the market (such as post-war jazz). Clarke does both, perhaps concentrating too much on the latter. Overall, he has chosen a reasonable interpretation of what is meant by "popular music".

The author of such a history must be knowledgeable about the subject; this is not so easy as it sounds as there are few people who know much about nineteenth century black-face performers and about bebop. While Clarke manages this admirably up to about 1965, he is opinionated and dismissive of almost all popular music since then - jazz, becoming a niche interest by that time, no longer really falls into the "popular" category and should really have been discussed mainly to suggest reasons why it became less popular - it became viewed as "art music", but was this because it became more difficult to understand as a listener, or was it due to perception or marketing?

This brings us to the main problem with the book, which is this antipathy to anything more recent than 1965 or so that isn't jazz. The problem with rock music, as Clarke sees it, is poor musicianship. It is certainly true that the standard to which instruments are played is often lower (though there are virtuoso players - many heavy rock guitarists, for example) and the stars are often bolstered by unsung session musicians (and Clarke misses the opportunity to point to one of the most famous examples of this, the original single version of Mr Tamborine Man by the Byrds) or by production techniques which smooth over the rough edges. However, the democratisation of popular music brought in by rock and roll is something of a return to the earlier traditions of folk musics, with the first half of the twentieth century where professional players and singers provided music for the masses being something of an aberration. This change, though, is effectively what Clarke means as the "fall" of popular music, and he talks about it as the legacy of the fame of Elvis Presley (as a former truck driver with no musical education) and the Beatles (who made it fashionable for bands to write their own material, however poor, rather than relying on professional song writers). However, rock music is popular, without a doubt, and (despite the judgements explicitly promised in the title) a history of popular music shouldn't be so dismissive, particularly as it leads to the omission of several important developments. It would be possible to dismiss jazz for equally personal reasons (I used to feel that except in the hands of an absolute master, improvised solos were just too banal to be worth listening to, for example): just because the author doesn't like a genre, doesn't mean that it's not popular music.

Some of the issues he raises have basically ceased to be the case: Clarke bemoans the loss of local music stores with knowledgeable personnel, and the Internet has more or less replaced this, as people can order just about any recording that's in print (and many that aren't) through Amazon or other record stores, view Web sites which tell them anything they want to know about a band, and listen to music from local (or not so local) up and coming musicians through MySpace and its competitors. Similarly, he is scathing about the quality of US radio, and the rise of independent media such as podcasting has thrown up an alternative. (However, since the nature of podcasts is that the listener needs to actively subscribe, it requires more engagement than overhearing a radio station playing inside a shop, so the two kinds of media are not precisely parallel.) The current fuss about the sharing of music over the Internet is also something which might well have been mentioned had the book been written now (and the importance of the Internet is a measure of how much has changed in the last ten years): it would follow on from the discussion of earlier attempts by the music industry to act restrictively against changes in the marketplace.

In other cases, his opinionated stance means that Clarke almost completely ignores developments which to me seem to be important. The rise of the power of an artist's image is really important in modern popular music, and it is not something ever mentioned directly (MTV and video, crucial elements of this change, get a brief mention). There are entire genres and approaches to music making that are either completely (punk) or almost completely (reggae) left out. Synthesisers are ignored. As a result, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music is at best a personal history of popular music, rather than one which covers everything which should really be in such a book.

In the end, it is fascinating to read, but will probably infuriate many readers. Re-reading it now has certainly inspired me to listen to more jazz: and that means that The Rise and Fall of Popular Music has done the best thing that a book on music can do, which is to send the reader back to the music itself.