JAZZ IS

A collection of quotes and anecdotes loosely organized around eleven influential personalities (Ellington, Holiday, Armstrong, Wilson, Mulligan, Davis, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane, Taylor, and Barbieri), some recent developments, and "the political economy of jazz"—a chapter title as misleading as the book's. Aficionados will find many famous vignettes along with a few previously unrecorded ones and corrections of misrecorded ones. But after more than thirty years writing everything from liner notes to novels about jazz, Hentoff's awed fan stance gets him no closer to a definition of it than his previous efforts. Now a Village Voice columnist on politics and civil liberties, his take on racial and cultural factors lacks the passion and scholarship of LeRoi Jones' Blues People and Black Music; his biographical data the depth of A. B. Spellman's Black Music: Four Lives; and his criticism the precision of Whitney Balliett's Ecstasy at the Onion or Martin Williams' fine The Jazz Tradition. Hentoff borrows from some of these and various biographies and autobiographies, making Jazz Is almost a sampler, worthwhile more as introduction than source book. Since there is no writer who has brought it all together for jazz the way, say, Edwin Denby has for dance, young readers and newcomers might use this book as a catalogue from which future reading and listening can be chosen.