Happy to see that Nate Chinen, who was an excellent jazz critic at the New York Times a while back, now has a Substack newsletter and is inviting subscribers:
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Have we all either finished the book or grown tired of the style? Sometimes it’s like reading a telephone directory. But without the action.
Seriously, when I spend time and listen to what I can find using ROON it’s not bad, but it’s thick reading.
I have to admit I stopped reading the book. I thought it was a good launchpad for a jazz newbie like me, but his style got a little tiresome, and the fact that each chapter focused on one person instead of one era meant that it wasn’t helpful to me as a guide to jazz in that particular era. I suppose I was looking for a more general history of jazz, and maybe that wasn’t his aim, but then the title is a bit misleading.
I’ve had far more fun discovering jazz by listening to an album, and if I like it, I look up who played on it, and then look up what else they played on, either as leaders or sidemen, and listen to those albums. It’s a huge incestuous pool of musicians, and I don’t know if I’ll ever run out of 60s Blue Note hard bop albums to discover this way.
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