Narrator Ron Butler narrates this exceptional audiobook with the laid-back flair and nuanced understanding of a seasoned jazz musician. His diverse phrasing palette is as interesting to hear as it is clarifying, and his performance is never too conspicuous as he conveys the drama surrounding the growth of jazz in America. Fans of this genre will recognize many of the key players described in the audiobook and be fascinated at how jazz, despite being born as a subversive musical form steeped in the black experience, snuck into equal status with classical music at New York’s Lincoln Center. There are also stirring accounts of the philosophical debates around pure jazz versus pop music and similar controversies such as how avant-garde players should regard the idioms of traditional jazz. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century
Narrated by Ron Butler
Nate ChinenUnabridged — 11 hours, 39 minutes
Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century
Narrated by Ron Butler
Nate ChinenUnabridged — 11 hours, 39 minutes
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Overview
“Playing changes,” in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes-ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical-that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.
Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters-from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding-who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.
Editorial Reviews
Chinen's text has some of the ever-digressive, hyper-allusive quality of its subject…He's gorgeous, though, when staying close to one artist (his Spalding chapter is particularly fine) or pairing his elaborate writing style with sober systemic analysis.
The best way to read Playing Changes is with YouTube and Spotify fired up on your laptop. Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears, and you'll want to make a playlist. You'll also want to hear and see what he's talking about…This book is at its best when grounded; when it mixes fact with more florid expression.
★ 05/28/2018
Former New York Times jazz critic Chinen charts a brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz. Tracing the evolution of the genre over the past 50 years, he demonstrates that no strict definition of jazz exists; it’s a volatile and generative music without fixed boundaries or rules. Chinen demonstrates the creative multiplicity of jazz by profiling diverse jazz artists and their contributions to and permutations of the art form. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington, for example, on his most recent album, The Epic, “crashes through an Afrocentric range of styles: surging hard-bop, steroidal jazz-funk, viscous soul.” Chinen explains how pianist Vishay Iyer focuses on a body-based way of playing piano, contending that the rhythmic domains of music are the same that our bodies use—breathing, walking, talking; bandleader and saxophonist Wayne Shorter leads his quartet so that tempos and tonal centers are endlessly subject to flux; and saxophonist Steve Coleman incorporates non-Western musical influences, such as the music of Ghana, India, and Brazil, as well as hip-hop styles. Chinen also points to developing jazz ecologies around the world—in Benin, China, Iraq, South Korea—that illustrate the ways that the music continues to grow and develop. Chinen’s virtuoso jazz history will drive readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time. (Aug.)
"Brilliant. Incisive. Jazz lives on and on and on, folks.”—Sonny Rollins
“Sharp in style and warm in feeling, Nate Chinen’s virtuoso survey dispenses with the familiar agendas and polemics that have too often boxed in writing on contemporary jazz. He follows the music where it goes and exults in its plurality of voices.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
“Chinen’s passion for the art form and deep understanding and knowledge of jazz make for a fascinating read. His firm support of the music and belief that the changes taking place within it will continue to serve it well—solidifying jazz as a global mode of communication without bounds—are truly uplifting.”—Herbie Hancock
"Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears, and you’ll want to make a playlist."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A terrific book about the shape of contemporary jazz, and right now is a terrific time to read it” —The Washington Post
"A perfectly timed, well-tuned chronicle of the past, present, and future of jazz...One of the essential music books of the young century, so far”—Slate
"Chinen's elegant, evocative writing is a mesmerizing staple of this essential book... Like the best nonfiction, Playing Changes will motivate jazz diehards and neophytes alike to discover what's out there and what's on the horizon."—PopMatters
"A really first-rate jazz critic has been necessary to lay out how vital it remains beneath all the encrusted misperceptions... It's always wonderful to read the results when artists and writers need each other."—Buffalo News
"A brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz... Chinen’s virtuoso jazz history will drive readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Narrator Ron Butler narrates this exceptional audiobook with the laid-back flair and nuanced understanding of a seasoned jazz musician. His diverse phrasing palette is as interesting to hear as it is clarifying, and his performance is never too conspicuous as he conveys the drama surrounding the growth of jazz in America. Fans of this genre will recognize many of the key players described in the audiobook and be fascinated at how jazz, despite being born as a subversive musical form steeped in the black experience, snuck into equal status with classical music at New York’s Lincoln Center. There are also stirring accounts of the philosophical debates around pure jazz versus pop music and similar controversies such as how avant-garde players should regard the idioms of traditional jazz. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
2018-05-15
A music critic assesses the current state of jazz.By the end of the 20th century, some observers of the jazz scene had concluded that "jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly." What possible surprises could be mined from an art form that "had already completed a full life cycle of creation, maturation, obsolescence, and revival"? A lot, it turns out, as Chinen (co-author, with George Wein: Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, 2003), the current NPR contributor and former jazz critic for the New York Times, demonstrates in this analysis of the state of jazz in the 21st century. No fan of "an overintellectualized, preciously ennobled, eat-your-vegetables idea of great American music," the author focuses on artists who are pushing jazz in new directions. These include saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who, with "The Epic," his 2015 debut album, "emerged as jazz's most persuasive embodiment of new black pride at a moment when few forces in American culture felt more pressing"; pianist Brad Mehldau, whose solo in one particular track so impressed guitarist Pat Metheny when he heard it while driving "that he pulled the car over to give it his full concentration"; drummer Tyshawn Sorey, composer of the "unclassifiable suite" The Inner Spectrum of Variables; bassist Esperanza Spalding; and more. Chinen gets bogged down with repeated references to the awards many of the cited artists have won, but jazz fans will find much to enjoy. Anyone looking to start a jazz collection will be happy to know that each chapter concludes with five recommended recordings. The author has a gift for memorable lines, as when he writes about D'Angelo's 2000 album "Voodoo": "There's an odd sensation that you often encounter listening to the album, not unlike absentmindedly reaching the top of a staircase and being startled when there isn't another step."As this illuminating book shows, jazz still has a lot to say about the world—and a lot of eloquent artists ready to say it.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169470338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Foreword
“A secret, a secret, I’ve got a little secret.” Cécile McLorin Salvant flashes a grin as she sings this playful taunt, the preamble to an old show tune, “If This Isn’t Love.” She’s at the Village Vanguard, which has entered its ninth decade with an indisputable reputation as the most hallowed jazz club in the world. In a couple of days Salvant would release a double album largely recorded in this room. But she doesn’t so much as mention it during the set. Her only partner onstage is the pianist Sullivan Fortner, and she seems determined to meet him in an elegant free fall, making adjustments and testing out methods on the fly.
The burden of jazz history lies in wait for a moment like this. Headlining the Vanguard to a sold-out crowd without a proven set list is a recipe for all manner of anxiety, not least the anxiety of influence. But over the course of her casually stunning performance, on a late-September evening in 2017, Salvant shows that she’s neither wrestling with ghosts nor shouldering a weight of obligation. Instead, she carries herself like the beneficiary of a trust: she’s got a little secret, and she’s letting her audience in on the action.
She knows better than anyone in the club that “If This Isn’t Love” was a calling card for the sublime jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, who recorded her definitive version in the 1950s. There’s a hint of Vaughan in Salvant’s bell-like tone and swooping inflection, but also abundant creative liberties in her phrasing. Rather than evoke the past from a stance of decorum or deference, Salvant is bent on stirring it up with sly intellectual rigor. Given how much effort has gone into the canonization of the jazz tradition, she’s a stealth subversive, working within a recognizable framework in ways that feel ecstatic and unbound.
The emergence of a jazz artist as audacious, unconflicted, and grounded as Salvant, at this stage in the game, suggests both the fulfillment of a promise and the rejection of an idea. During the waning phase of the last century, jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly. Market forces—primed by a relentless campaign of reissues and compilations, tributes and emulations—had fed a common perception that the music reached its peak in a distant golden age. What could Salvant possibly be if not a throwback? The art form had already completed a full life cycle of creation, maturation, obsolescence, and revival.
Gary Giddins, the astute jazz critic, once delineated that trajectory in an essay with a cheeky title, “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead?” In it, he argues that the development of any musical form can be divided into four stages. The first is Native, followed by Sovereign. Then comes Recessionary. Finally, we arrive at Classical—when “Even the most adventurous young musicians are weighed down by the massive accomplishments of the past.”
Most mainstream narratives of jazz over the last several decades followed the general contour of this model. Critics and historians, planting their surveying equipment on Classical bedrock, took their measure of the music along a timeline. So it was no surprise that the conventional framework suggested an inexorable march of progress. And it made sense that jazz, especially for those outside its orbit, meant something openly retrograde. When Giddins updated his four-stage paradigm in 2009 for Jazz, a sprawling history coauthored with the scholar Scott DeVeaux, he suggested that it might help to envision the music in a “post-historical” mode. That notion seems almost custom-fitted to Salvant, with her refusal to be typecast by precedent.
But she’s just one figure in a vast new complex, the dimensions of which make the four-stage paradigm feel reductive. What the most recent jazz surveys and histories tend to ignore is an explosion of new techniques, accents, and protocols that define the state of the art in our time. Some of this happened in response to widespread upheaval. As the art form began to settle into its second century, its practitioners faced tougher conditions than any previous generation: a broken infrastructure, an uncertain course, a distracted, if not alienated, consumer base.
But more than one wave of improvising artists has confronted this tumult, seizing license to create freer and more self-reliant forms of art. Raised with unprecedented access to information, they scour jazz history not for a linear narrative but a network of possibilities. Their frame of reference is broad enough to encourage every form of hybridism. They understand jazz as something other than a stable category. And their work has evolved the music—insofar as harmonic color, dynamic flow, group interaction, and a complex yet streamlined expression of rhythm are concerned.
Jazz has always been a frontier of inquiry, with experimentation in multiple registers. That’s as true now as it has ever been. But to a striking degree, avant-garde practice and formal invention have now insinuated themselves into the mainstream, shifting the music’s aesthetic center. Not even a resurgent strain of hot-jazz antiquarianism—the province of out-and-proud nostalgists—can stem the current trend toward polyglot hypermodernism, toward unexpected composites and convergences.
This book begins with a reflection on the crisis of confidence that distorted jazz’s ecology during the late phases of the twentieth century. Tracing a historicist agenda that actualized in the 1970s, mobilized in the 1980s, and all but tyrannized the 1990s, this narrative sets an important context for our present moment of abundance. As the music transitioned out of the last century, it became increasingly clear that a conscientious foothold in tradition could work in peaceful tandem with many approaches that fall outside a strict definition of jazz. The whole idea of a definition, in fact, was beginning to feel outmoded. Whatever you choose to call the music, “jazz” is as volatile and generative now as at any time since its beginnings. Instead of stark binaries and opposing factions, we face a blur of contingent alignments. Instead of a push for definition and one prevailing style, we have boundless permutations without fixed parameters. That multiplicity lies precisely at the heart of the new aesthetic—and is the engine of its greatest promise.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Playing Changes"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Nate Chinen.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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