Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White - Hardcover

Lees, Gene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195084489 ISBN 13: 9780195084481

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

It was none other than Louis Armstrong who said, "These people who make the restrictions, they don't know nothing about music. It's no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow." "You can't know what it means to be black in the United States--in any field," Dizzy Gillespie one said, but Gillespie vigorously objected to the proposition that only black people could play jazz. "If you accept that premise, well then what you're saying is that maybe black people can only play jazz. And black people, like anyone else, can be anything they want to be."

In Cats of Any Color, Gene Lees, the acclaimed author of three previous collections of essays on jazz and popular music, takes a long overdue look at the shocking pervasiveness of racism in jazz's past and present--both the white racism that long ghettoized the music and generations of talented black musicians, and what Lees maintains is an increasingly virulent reverse racism aimed at white jazz musicians. In candid interviews, living jazz legends, critics, and composers step forward and share their thoughts on how racism has affected their lives. Dave Brubeck, part Modoc Indian, discusses native Americans' contribution to jazz and the deeply ingrained racism that for a time made it all but impossible for jazz groups with black and white players to book tours and television appearances. Horace Silver looks back on his long career, including the first time he ever heard jazz played live. Blacks were not not allowed into the pavilion in Connecticut where Jimmie Lunceford's band was performing, so the ten-year-old Silver listened and watched through the wooden slats surrounding the pavilion. "And oh man! That was it!" Silver recalls. Red Rodney recalls his early days with Charlie "Bird" Parker, and pianist and composer Cedar Walton tells of the time Duke Ellington played at the army base at Ford Dix and allowed the young enlisted Walton to sit in. Tracing the jazz world's shifting attitude towards race, many of the stories Lees tells are inspiring--Brubeck cancelling 23 out of 25 concert dates in the South rather than replace black bass player Eugene Wright, or Silver insisting that while he strives to provide his fellow black musicians opportunities, "I just want the best musicans I can get. I don't give a damn if they're pink or polka dot." Others are profoundly disturbing--Lees' first encounter with Oscar Peterson, after a Canadian barber flatly refused to cut Peterson's hair, or Wynton Marsalis on television claiming that blacks have been held back for so many years because the music business is controlled by "people who read the Torah and stuff."

From the old shantytowns of Louisville, to the streets of South Central L.A., to the up-to-the-minute controversies surrounding Marsalis's jazz program at Lincoln Center, and the Jazz Masters awards given by the NEA, Cats of Any Color confronts racism head-on. At its heart is a passionate plea to recognize jazz not as the sole property of any one group, but as an art form celebrating the human spirit--not just for the protection of individual musicians, but for the preservation of the music itself.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
Gene Lees is the award-winning author of Waiting for Dizzy, Meet Me at Jim and Andy's, and Singers and the Song, as well as biographies of Oscar Peterson and Lerner and Loewe. A former editor of Down Beat, he has written extensively for Stereo Review, The New York Times and other publications. Since 1981 he has published, edited, and written for the respected JazzLetter.

Reviews

Lees, former editor of Down Beat, presents a collection of essays, most of which are based on interviews originally published in Jazzletter. He talks with ethnomusicologist Dominique de Lerma, pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, singer Ernie Andrews, pianist and composer Horace Silver, trumpeter Red Rodney, saxophonist and composer Benny Golson, bassist Red Mitchell, pianist and composer Cedar Walton, drummer Kenny Washington and pianist and drummer Jack DeJohnette. In discussing their careers, most are restrained about the issue of racism and jazz. Only in his final piece does Lees, a white, Canadian-born writer who deplores attempts by black musicians to claim jazz as a purely black art form, get to the meat of his book, an attack on what he considers the antiwhite bias about jazz currently fostered by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writers like Herb Boyd and Stanley Crouch. This, in addition to the interview with de Lerma, a black who challenges simplistic myths concerning the origins of jazz, provides a thought-provoking look at the contemporary jazz world.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another sterling collection of essays by one of our best jazz critics, drawn from his superb newsletter, Jazzletter. Lees (Waiting for Dizzy, 1991, etc.) is back with more of the elegant writing and insightful thought that has made him such a highly praised music critic. Tying this collection together are some sharp observations--both by Lees and by the musicians he profiles--about the ethnic and racial roots of jazz and the ways in which they reflect the tensions that afflict American society. In the opening essay, he writes movingly about growing up in Canada as a young jazz buff and about his encounters with racism both as an adolescent and as a young journalist. Elsewhere in the book, he offers profiles of Dave Brubeck, who is part Native American; musicologist Dominique de Lerma, who discourses on the multiplicity of cultures that have fed into jazz music; bassist Red Mitchell, who offers some mordant comments on the decay of American democracy; singer Ernie Andrews, who talks about the effects of racism in Los Angeles both in the '40s and today. Finally, in one of the longest pieces in any of his collections, he takes on the anti-white bias of many black musicians and writers, and fires a convincing broadside at the monumental and hollow edifice that is trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. This last piece is not calculated to endear him to anyone of a black nationalist bent, nor will its equally fiery attacks on white racism win him any friends among neoconservatives. But Lees has long been one of those handful of social and arts critics who say what needs to be said. Essential reading for any serious jazz fan or student of American culture. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Growing up in a hard-working, left-leaning Canadian family in the 1940s and 1950s, Lees loved everything American, from movie stars to cartoons to music. And what could be more American than jazz? Since moving to the States in the mid-Fifties, he has written on jazz for the New York Times, was an editor at the respected Down Beat, and now publishes JazzLetter. After several books on the music and the artists (Waiting for Dizzy, LJ 4/15/91), Lees now turns to an often underplayed aspect of the industry: racism. Yet this is anything but a dry sociopolitical treatise. Through interviews with musicians, composers, and critics, Lees describes the varying ways that racism has always been a part of the jazz scene. Still, the blacks and whites, Jews and Native Americans who share their views here sound one common theme: love of music transcends race. Written by a real authority who also happens to be a gifted writer, this book is recommended for all music libraries.
Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jazz critic Lees' own life is as fascinating as the lives of his favorite musicians. Including such adventures as a nearly fatal mishap in a Canadian paper mill and an afternoon spent watching the Kentucky Derby with William Faulkner, it successfully competes with Lees' usual fare, utterly engrossing chronicles of the likes of trumpeter Red Rodney and singer Ernie Andrews, whom he gives ample space to tell their stories. There's a major theme in Cats of Any Color, too: jazz is a multiethnic art, and critics and players who ignore the contributions of non-African American performers harmfully segregate the music. The most incendiary chapter here, "Jazz Black and White," is an articulate, informed, vigorous attack on antiwhite arts administrators who make jazz seem "useful only for the expression of the angers and resentments of an American minority." With statements like that, Lees isn't going to win many friends these days, but he certainly knows how to do the task he sets himself very well. Aaron Cohen

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195084489
• ISBN 13: 9780195084481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256