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Robert Gottlieb ed., Reading Jazz (1996) Reissued by Vintage in 1999. Gottlieb, former New Yorker editor and former president of Alfred A. Knopf, says he'd never been very interested in jazz until a trip to a record store in the early 1990s, when he got turned onto Lee Miley and Mel Torme and never looked back. Jazz turned into an obsession for Gottlieb and soon he was working on Reading Jazz: a more than 1,000-page anthology of nearly everything ever said (in print) on the subject of jazz and its musicians from 1919 to 1996. "I was trying to achieve two things: to give an overview of jazz, one in which just about anybody who had ever said anything worth listening to would be well represented; and also to provide an overview of jazz writing," Gottlieb has said. The anthology is divided into three parts--autobiography, reportage (mainly profiles) and criticism--and encompasses more than 150 excerpts from books, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including extracts from longer autobiographical works and liner notes from albums. The collection is heavy on early reportage and early artists, and some critics have called the anthology predictable and nostalgic (as well as too long and too expensive). But the work is often revealing, from Anita O'Day's personal account of being busted for drugs in 1954 to Lillian Ross's comical telling of the first Newport Jazz Festival: The anthology sets the standard for learning--and thinking--about jazz. From Bart Schneider of Salon.com: "It's a bedside reader, basically, for older jazz fans who are unfazed by the steep sticker price and want a hit of atmosphere along with their oxygen." From Publisher's Weekly: "The effort to pull together so large a collection of such pieces, on a subject that in general has defied analysis, has clearly been prodigious, and jazz buffs owe a great deal to Gottlieb for rescuing so much of this material from obscurity." MORE: Interview with Gottlieb from Interview magazine (Dec., 1996) Review from JAM magazine (Jazz Ambassadors Magazine, 1997) |
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