At its heart, “Jazz’’ is a history lesson. Giddins and DeVeaux start with post-Civil War African-American folk culture and wind up in 2008, when the Grammy for best album went to Herbie Hancock for “River: The Joni Letters,’’ his tribute to Joni Mitchell. But this book also serves as a covert primer on how to hear jazz - what to listen for, and how to understand what is going on. Such a conceit might seem pretentious - indeed, it might seem arrogant, suggesting that the listener needs to know something before she can appreciate the music and determine whether she likes it - but it is not.
If anything, the authors analyze individual performances to the extreme, in their attempt to impart wisdom. Here is what distinguishes “Jazz’’ from those that have come before: It contains copious dissections of 78 tracks. A recording of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues’’ or Sarah Vaughan’s “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home?’’ is scrutinized and annotated, with authors’ notes explaining what happens as the tune begins, eight seconds into it, and on and on.
In just about every case, it’s an overly academic exercise that becomes a buzzkill. By nature, a jazz fan wants to be surprised, energized, even jolted by music. Forget all that. A two-and-half-minute recording of “Weather Bird’’ by Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines consumes two pages of examination: “0:00: Armstrong plays the opening melody on trumpet, discreetly backed by Hines’s piano. 0:04 Armstrong displays his command of dynamics. Some notes are played at full volume.’’ Et cetera, et cetera.
In many instances the intense analysis comes at the expense of history. Billie Holiday was perhaps jazz’s most important singer, yet the authors’ dissection of “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,’’ one of her lesser known pieces, gets as much ink as does her entire career. More problematic is that the passages mean nothing to the reader unless the reader is multitasking: reading and listening to a recording at the same time. Yet who among us possesses all of the recordings mentioned herein?
