Edited by David Adler – who contributes a piece of “self-confessed shameless promotion” in a prolix introduction to this massive compendium states “I’m proud of my two published books (Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz and Future Jazz) and my unpublished ones.”
The Jazz Omnibus is published and available in all formats at Amazon.com and from the Cymbal Press. It is “focused on the incredibly resilient creative expression we call jazz”. An anthology of essays, reviews, interviews, and profiles (by worldwide contributors – but none that I can spot from JJ), it consists of a plethora of previously unpublished reviews and articles. We are reliably (?) informed that “there has been nothing quite like it in jazz literature”.
Weighing in at 1.75 pounds, with nearly 600 pages, TJO contains previously published material, and is dedicated to the memory of eminent American jazz critic and scholar Dan Morgenstern (1929 – 2024). With 69 articles, 23 black and white photos and a selected bibliography, it is divided into six vague categories – Legends, Seekers, Scenes, Sounds, The World and Remembered – it’s hard to hold open and annotate (but thankfully easier to close). Sponsored by Verve, Impulse! and Blue Note records, the Berklee School of Music’s Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, and the Jazz Foundation of America, it is still something of a curate’s egg. For example, are many of us likely to want to read about ”The Mutant World Music of Dar Es Salaam” (Don Palmer)?
On the credit side, there are informative essays on Sonny Rollins (Ted Panken), Carla Bley (Suzanne Lorge), Wynton Marsalis (Doug Hall), Amy Winehouse (Ted Gioia), Sun Ra (Nate Chinen), plus an obituary of George Wein (Peter Keepnews). In his analytical essay on Rollins, Ted Panken suggests for Sonny “practice time is less a burden than a lifestyle”. Lorge quotes Carla Bley as saying “The key moments in my life as a composer have occurred quietly and privately, at the desk or at the piano,” while Ted Gioia confesses that in judging Winehouse as a jazz singer “half of my case rests on what she did, and the other half on what she had the capability of doing, but never got a chance”. Wynton Marsalis, in conversation with Doug Hall, praises the achievements of Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, and suggests that jazz musicians “don’t necessarily need or want to go back to Napoleon’s time… but we can still listen to Beethoven”.
TJO is also valuable in devoting attention to female jazz performers – many of whom were previously unknown to me: pianist/composer Amina Claudine Myers, vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant, singer-songwriter Patricia Barber, vocalist and pioneering early jazz violinist Angelina Rivera. There are also excellent and informed pieces on “Sweethearts of Jazz: The Women of Seattle’s Black Musicians Union” (David Keller),:and “The Israeli Jazz Wave” (Andrew Gilbert). I would particularly recommend Michael J. West’s illuminating piece “The Rise and Decline of Guitarist Emily Remler”.
Yet, on balance,it is difficult to recommend this tome unreservedly. Despite the encomiums of such respected critics as Gary Giddins, Louis Armstrong’s biographer Ricky Riccardi and critic and poet A.B. Spellman, who believes ”You will spend many happy years thinking about what you have read in this book,” TJO, with no doubt worthy (and commercial) intentions casts too wide a net, is poorly organised, over-crammed, and of limited use as a reference work.
The Jazz Omnibus: 21st Century Photos and Writings by Members of the Jazz Journalists Association. Cymbal Press, hb, 512pp and 73pp notes and bibliography. ISBN 978-1-955604-19-2
