Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History

by Robert Walser (editor)

Drawing from contemporary journalism, reviews, program notes, memoirs, interviews, and other sources, Keeping Time lets you experience, first hand, the controversies and critical issues that have accompanied jazz from its very birth. Edited by Robert Walser, these sixty-two thought provoking pieces offer a wealth of insight into jazz. Some of the giants of jazz speak to us here, including Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Wynton Marsalis. And there are pieces by writers such as Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, and Ralph Ellison, and by critics such as Leonard Feather and Gunther Schuller. Readers will find Louis Armstrong on what makes swing, Dizzy Gillespie on bebop, and Miles Davis on jazz-rock fusion. Equally important, Walser has selected writings that capture the passionate reactions of people who have loved, hated, supported, and argued about jazz. One can read, for instance, a dismissive article written in 1918 that relegates jazz to the "servant's hall of music" along with "the clatter of the clogs, the click of Slavic heels." Or a debate between Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock over the merits of free jazz and electric instruments. Or Duke Ellington's claim that jazz is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but "goes back to something just about as old--and as natural--as the circulation of the blood." In the end, the focus here remains on how the music works and why people have cared about it. Filled with passionately felt, insightful writing, Keeping Time will increase one's historical awareness of jazz even as it provokes lively discussion among jazz aficionados, whether in clubs, concert halls or classrooms.

Genres: Music, Jazz

464 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 19, 1998

Reviews

[Miles Jaffee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm finally done with this absolute brick of a book. Genius laying-out of essays from some of the greatest minds in jazz and music criticism from the 1910s to the 2010s. Dry, academic, slow as hell, but a powerful sense of being COMPLETE, all-encompassing.

[Kyra]

I read it a few years ago but I'm reading it again. Forgot how good it was. A must for any musician.

"Music is...a lost thing finding itself. It's like a man with no place of his own. He wanders the world and he's a stranger wherever he is; he's a stranger right in the place where he was born. But then something happens to him and he finds a place, his place. He stands in front of it and he crosses the door, going inside. That's where the music was that day--taking him through the door. He was coming home."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now in its second edition, Walser's collection remains an incredibly useful miscellany for understanding the ragged range of responses to jazz over the past one hundred years.