Jazz – The New Modern

Jazz writer Ted Gioia on the late Dave Brubeck

RIP Dave Brubeck… An exceedingly cool cat, as Dana Gioia writes:

How many celebrities have a marriage that lasts 70 years? I think Dave is the only one. He was a very caring family man, a good dad and husband – never a given in the entertainment industry. He was a pioneer on civil rights, threatening to cancel concerts when faced with complaints about his integrated band. He served his country as a soldier (at the Battle of the Bulge) and as both an official and unofficial ambassador.

In memoriam: Dave Brubeck | OUPblog
By Ted Gioia I first met Dave Brubeck when I was in my twenties, and writing my book on West Coast jazz. Dave deeply impressed me…

Ted Gioia on the Birth and Death of the Cool

Has coolness runs its course? Are we living in a post-“cool” culture?

Musician and writer Ted Gioia talks about his new book, The Birth and Death of the Cool in episode 102 of The New Modern podcast. You can listen using the embedded player above or via iTunes. Please consider leaving a review and subscribing (for free) to future New Modern podcasts in the iTunes store.

Renowned for his important books about music, especially his History of Jazz, Ted Gioia is a prolific culture writer and literary critic.

Scott Timberg, the Los Angeles writer (and a pretty cool guy), recently posted a Q&A with Gioia on his new book. Though many will find much to disagree with in Gioia’s arguments, there’s a unquestionably a new fashion for authenticity and sincerity.

Whether that spirit marks the death of “cool” in the sense that Ted Gioia means it, remains to be seen. Listen to our interview, read the book, and decide for yourself.

[Watch this space for additional links and a full transcript.]

Louis Armstrong: Terry Teachout’s stirring new biography of the jazz icon

Pops, Terry Teachout‘s new biography of Louis Armstrong, gets a rave review in the New York Times:

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

The full review of Pops by Michiko Kakutani is well worth reading. This is a book about a great musician and performer, but it’s also a story about race, American history and identity, and the nature of genius.

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Hear Teachout read from the book–passages on Armstrong’s love for marijuana and his bold denunciations of segregation–in this Vanity Fair “Writers Reading” podcast.

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And enjoy this 1956 performance in London… “Mack the Knife.”