Let me just begin by saying that this will not be my only communication between now and your scheduled visit. I thought perhaps a more detailed, thoughtful correspondence, rather than the more usual list, might prove helpful. Rather than just tell you what I most want then, I thought I'd explain my requests at greater length, individually. (The mistake I've made in years past may have been in trusting your organization to keep abreast of the reviews and the publishers' catalogues. Clearly, there have been major cutbacks in your books division. I can sympathize. It is no easy thing in these days of big-box-retail and online ordering to find some of the better, less-ballyhooed books. One has to know where to look. I don't know if the North Pole still has any independent bookstores, but based on recent experience, I begin to doubt it. All very nice to get giftcards, but I don't frequent the kind of book-retailers with which some of my more distant correspondents would seem to be most familiar and to which, sadly nowadays, they would seem only to have access. Keeping in mind that while I do indeed work in an independent bookstore and can therefore find all the new books I most want, this also means I only make the kind of wages paid by an independent bookstore, so I'm counting on you, Santa, now more than ever. Like Margaret O'Brien before me, I want very much to believe in you, despite my better judgement, so do try, won't you?)
The things I most want this year are not necessarily obscure, but they are all quite expensive -- at least from my perspective -- so I've tried to be genuinely discriminating and ask only for the very best books I've seen this season. Were I not to get everything I want, of course I will understand, but I really do hope to find at least a few of my most fervent wishes waiting under the tree this year, and tagged with your name, as no one else around here is in a position to provide me with this stuff. Forgetting for the moment that my beloved husband is a retiree, and was raised a Witness and therefore without much enthusiasm for you or December 25th, I've long since so frustrated my friends and family when it comes to buying books for me that they've all but given up the idea entirely. Can't blame them. I'm hard to shop for. I have too many books already, would seem to be the thought, and who knows what I might have already read? So, mostly now I get giftcards for Olive Garden. I do enjoy eating at the Olive Garden, don't get me wrong, but, to be honest, how often these days do we ever get to a shopping mall? It's still books I most want to see, come Christmas morning, Santa, and unless I buy them myself, that's unlikely, at least with the big ticket items, for reasons already mentioned.
For example, Will Friedwald, the jazz critic for the kind of newspapers I don't read, has written a fabulous new book, A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. It is a beautiful big book from Pantheon, weighing in at more than eight hundred closely printed pages, and well worth the asking price of forty-five bucks, but I just don't have that kind of money right now, even for a book so perfectly suited to both my taste in music and criticism.I'll explain. I'd never knowingly read Friedwald before, but as soon as I spied the book on the shelf, I suspected a kindred crank. I like that word, "Biographical," in the title. My musical curiosity is largely confined to performers. The title of the book also asserts something patently false, with which I nevertheless have a perfect sympathy; namely the increasingly eccentric equation of jazz with American popular music, despite the passage of forty years in which that has long since ceased to be a fact. When I think of "Pop," I do not think of Rock & Roll, Hip Hop, or any other of the more recent developments in musical entertainment. For me, a pop singer is still a performer whose primary medium is words and melody. A jazz singer, at least of the kind I love best, is usually a pop singer with a musician's sense of rhythm and time, and, hopefully, a great trio behind her. Seeing "Pop" used in this way in Friedwald's title, and a quick review of his table of contents, confirmed my suspicion that I might have a friend unsuspected in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. (I'm as shocked by this as anyone, believe me.) Hoping for the best, I ran my finger down the maddeningly un-alphabetical list of singers until I hit on Rosie. In any book of multiple biography, there are certain names, the absence of which all but guarantees my dismissal of the book unread. If a book about the literary Romantics, for instance, spares not a word, or has only an unpleasant word, for Lamb or Leigh Hunt, then I could give a tinker's damn for it. Likewise, any discussion of jazz singing in the last century that fails to mention the recordings of Rosemary Clooney, specially those of her last twenty years on the Concord label, I would no more want to read than something academic in the present incarnation of Downbeat Magazine.
Well, Santa, there she was: Rosemary Clooney, pages 93 through 99! I had to read that.
Says Mr. Friedwald, in only the second paragraph of his wonderfully full entry on Clooney, "She could take 32 bars of some song you'd heard a thousand times sung by everybody and his brother and turn it into a fresh and intensely personal testament."
Comrade!
I must have read at least twenty or more entries by now, and I've been nodding so vigorously in agreement that my neck hurts. The guy likes Alice Faye! He gets what was good in June Christy. He gives Annette Hanshaw her due. He says of the much neglected Della, "Reese resonates pure energy, practically tearing into each tune like a hungry hound on a roast chicken." What makes all of this so delightful is that he is all about the singing, and the swinging. When he tells something of the life, it is to inform what he says about the performance, not the other way 'round, which is exactly right. And he isn't just gushing. He can write beautifully of Mel Torme's virtuosity, without making him a bigger man than he was, and he can balance the criticism of someone like Betty Carter against the worship and come down with a pretty fair estimation of both her extraordinary talent and her -- to me at least -- incredibly irritating distortions. Made me want to play some Betty Carter records again, did Will Friedwald. Imagine that!
That, to my mind, is what a critical enthusiast like Friedwald can do for listeners like me; not just say better what I would say myself, but make me reconsider a singer, or a recording, I didn't much care for, or might have forgotten otherwise. I got my jazz education from writers like Whitney Balliett, and Gary Giddons. I want to own Will Friedwald's new book because he belongs on that shelf.
Do what you can, Santa Baby. I am as always
Your fan,
Brad
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