The Jazz Tradition
Martin Williams, who died in 1993, exerted an enormous influence on America's dialogue about jazz. He directed the Smithsonian Institute's jazz program, oversaw reissues on LP, cassette, and compact disc, and wrote a slew ofbookson the topic. His most lasting legacy, however, may be this compact volume, which appeared in a revised and expanded version in 1992. Williams approaches his material with a New Critical bent, analyzing specific performances--sometimes even specific phrases--in search of improvisational gold. But he brings a new clarity to everything he touches, from Jelly Roll Morton to the World Saxophone Quartet. And while Williams liked to keep his prose free of rhetorical fireworks, he's quite capable of registering the sublime. Here, for example, he sets the record straight on late-period Louis Armstrong: "Well into his 60s, Armstrong would play on some evenings in an astonishing way--astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven's late quartets) to be beyond music."