Shooting From The Hip is a hefty and (I would guess near-comprehensive collection of Fordham’s articles for Time Out, The Guardian and other publications from 1970 to the present day. As a result, it is not a book I can imagine many people reading at a sitting, or indeed in linear A-Z fashion – although it is rewarding to do so. The excellent index will make such work easy, and the elegance of the prose and its attendant insights may well, after all, make you read further than you first intended.
I cannot pretend that Fordham’s tastes are always my own; he has a greater fondness for radical or experimental jazz than I can usually muster, and on those occasions when he considers more mainstream stuff I often cannot concur with his judgements – although his several pieces on latterday Gillespie are uniformly excellent. But respectful disagreement is as healthy as it is inevitable (indeed, it is what good criticism exists to promote) and what impresses most of all about these pieces is Fordham’s honesty and committed integrity: what he hears is what you get, which gives the volume a formidable consistency and ‘voice’. What he hears is pretty good, too, all disagreements duly allowed for: inter alia he is highly perceptive about David Murray, Loose Tubes, Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis, and superb on Stan Tracey.
Shooting From The Hip is basically a chronological pot pourri, but that sometimes unhelpful format is here effected with reader-friendly thoughtfulness: Fordham provides an incisive summatory essay introducing each succeeding decade, and as noted the index is exemplary. And if one or two things continue to stick in one’s craw somewhat – the ‘gossamer saxophone’ of Stan Getz, forsooth! – this is a superior volume that both deserves and will repay the close attention of any serious jazz enthusiast.
Shooting From The Hip by John Fordham, Kyle Cathie Ltd; 532 pp; pb, £12.99. ISBN 1-85626-181-6
