Ralph J. Gleason (1917-1975) was a jazz journalist, prolific writer, critic, entrepreneur, political commentator and pundit from the 1930s until his death. His notable books were Celebrating The Duke & Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy, & Others (1975), and Conversations In Jazz (edited by his son Toby Gleason) taped at his home with 14 luminaries including Coltrane, Gillespie, John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans and Duke Ellington. He was also a co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine and the Monterey Jazz Festival. Significantly, his musical tastes and enthusiasms were not confined to jazz. Gleason initially derided the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Elvis, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, but quickly recanted and became their champion. He claimed that R&B, pop, gospel, blues and folk were part of the ever-expanding American musical church of which jazz was historically the major – but not the only – congregant. In later years, Gleason also extolled the virtues of Simon and Garfunkel, Chuck Berry, the “underground” comedian Lenny Bruce and novelists Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac. When Gleason wrote a scathing review of a Sinatra performance at Madison Square Garden, Sinatra (surprisingly) responded: “Ralph often led me to better performances, and I am eternally grateful to him for that.”
In what is obviously a labour of love, Don Armstrong covers all of these bases and paints a portrait of a “musical omnivore”. My guess is that readers of JJ will be more interested in his reflections on Gleason’s jazz opinions and pronouncements. His central contention was that jazz was the font of all subsequent American music – gospel, R&B, country, pop and rock. this is most evident in the earlier chapters of the book, but they are weakened by a prolix prose style – which frequently lapses into the historical present. An example: ”He goes to the Onyx one night, and although the audience ignores Morton’s keyboard inventions, Gleason listens with rapt attention.” Not all white “pop” singers received the Gleason badge of approval; he (correctly) dismissed Pat Boone as being “nice, clean-cut, antiseptic, pallid, pretentious and even a bit of a phony”.
Gleason “retired” from DownBeat after editor Gene Lees charged him with being “a prima donna about any editing done to his prose”, which was “usually slapdash, sometimes incoherent, and sometimes even ungrammatical”, for writing over length and above all for missing deadlines.
We are reminded that from the outset of his writing career Gleason denounced racial inequality and segregation, and early “showed signs of the pluralistic tastes that would distinguish him from critics who specialized in just one or two genres”. Armstrong applauds the fact that Gleason “became the first nationally known jazz critic to embrace popular music”. Is this a feather in his cap or a black eye? To his lasting credit, in 1974 Gleason eulogised Ellington as the “greatest composer this nation has ever produced”. In his essay Celebrating The Duke (et al) he affirmed “No one in my memory has ever had the ability to make the piano growl and rumble the way [he] could, with those low clusters of notes and that heavy rhythm….he could be melodic and rhapsodic sometimes playing melodic lines that seemed to sing almost as if they had words.” Right on! (Duke applauded the two TV documentaries Gleason produced about him and his orchestra.) Away from jazz, Gleason wrote biting critiques of Richard Nixon’s presidential misdemeanours, and was proud to discover that he was the only music journalist on Nixon’s notorious Enemies List.
Questionable for its interpretation of the evolution and “transformations” of jazz, and with long-winded and present-tense digressions, this study will be of limited interest to jazz “fundamentalists”. There are also such minor errors as the following: “Japanese fighter jets bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.” Again, there was to my knowledge no clarinet player called Hode Cless, while New Orleans trumpeter Sharkey Bananas is best remembered as Bonano. This is something of a curate’s egg.
The Life And Writings Of Ralph J. Gleason – Dispatches From The Front, by Don Armstrong. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 289pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-6698-7
