Blue: The Murder Of Jazz by Eric Nisenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"This is why so much bland improvised music is popular now: the tinkling bells, liquid melodies, and vapid prettiness of New Age; the dentist's-office jazz of Kenny G. and Grover Washington, Jr.; and the reactionary and utterly predictable watered-down hard bop of the neoclassicists. It is improvisation without risk, without ecstasy, without soul."

I envy the author his writing skills! I wish I could pen phrases like "vapid prettiness of New Age," "utterly predictable watered-down hard bop of the neoclassicists," and so many others. I completely agree with the author, Eric Nisenson, in his 1997 grim diagnosis of the state of jazz in the mid-1990s. I dearly love jazz, mainly the 1960s' jazz, but also many earlier and more recent works. The only two kinds of jazz I cannot stand are the so-called "smooth jazz" - the "dentist's-office" music - and the soulless, riskless, ecstasyless mechanical "jazz" that Wynton Marsalis and his ilk used to produce

The blurb on the cover of Eric Nisenson's Blue. The Murder of Jazz very aptly describes the book: "A road map to the current jazz wars," a quote from the Wall Street Journal. And what a great road map it is! Of course, I am biased: I seem to love the same type of jazz that the author loves, yet even without the bias a careful reader cannot disagree with the author's line of reasoning and his clear, item-by-item, logical exposition of why the kind of music promoted by Jazz at the Lincoln Center had nothing to do with the supposed "resurgence of jazz." It is precisely the other way around: the neoclassicist ideology - as espoused in the writings of two jazz critics, Albert Murray (the "Karl Marx" of the movement) and Stanley Crouch (the movement's "Lenin") - and the neoclassicist practice of jazz - as implemented by Mr. Marsalis and other artists under the Lincoln Center's banner - killed jazz. The neoclassicist movement murdered everything what was valuable in jazz: the spontaneity, the creativity, the seeking of what has not yet been done.

For any jazz lover this is a great book to read, even if one does not want to take sides in the fight for the soul of jazz. From the introduction, where the author charmingly paints his lifelong love for jazz, through the quite detailed yet never boring or overwhelming history of jazz music - period-by-period, with chapters on swing, bebop, cool, fusion, etc. - to the clear exposition of the mid-1990s sad state of things, the text captivates the reader with clarity, depth, and good writing.

Let me now return to polemical mood and quote some of the issues that the author mentions but - in my view - does not emphasize enough. First is the fact that the neoclassicist movement is controlled by business interests and that much of it has little to do with art. Yes, Wynton Marsalis is a virtuoso, no one questions his enormous talent, yet the music he produces is evidently designed to sell not to inspire. Second - and the author is way too polite to state it unequivocally; I do not need to be polite - comparing Mr. Marsalis' music to that of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, or Sun Ra - is simply insulting. Yes, his musical skills may be comparable, but his music sucks because it has no soul.
Genuine jazz music has to be created "in and for the moment" and "reflect the lives and times of the musicians playing it." Its depth comes about "from the souls of the musicians" who create it at a particular moment in time.

To end on a less vitriolic note: I am thankful to the author for including quite a long passage on Sun Ra and his Arkestra - some of the greatest innovators in all music. I will look for further readings about Sun Ra and the band.

Four and a half stars.

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