Jazz in Strange Places

One goal of newspaper management should be to have people on staff whom readers will notice when they arrive and miss when they’re gone. Not all readers, of course, but at least the ones who care about the subjects a given writer was covering. You work in forest products, and after a while you notice that the reporter on the softwood beat is no longer there to break stories. You are a civil servant and suddenly there are stories about intrigue among the cubicles that nobody else has uncovered. You care about movies and Jay Scott dies. The best writers matter, not by dint of style or cheek but of authority. Newspapers cannot survive if there are too many people writing for them who might as well, for all the difference they make, not be writing for them.

This is the modest tribute history pays to the modest Mark Miller: for 27 years he covered jazz for The Globe and Mail. He left last December. And already with a flashlight and a team of hounds you can’t find anything worth reading about jazz in the Globe. This matters to those of us who love jazz. Multiplied across a dozen beats—who is making sense of public finance, now that Bruce Little has left? That’s right: nobody—it matters more to those of us who care about newspapers.

Miller, who has left the Globe to concentrate on writing books, brings a quiet authority to his writing that has made him the indispensable voice on jazz in Canada. It is not a practitioner’s authority. Like many critics, he brings no particular musical ability to the table. He owned a drum kit once but he gave it away. He is an advocate for the audience, not for the musicians, but that is hardly rare in jazz criticism. And it is forgivable because the audience outnumbers the musicians, usually even if the musicians are playing jazz.

What kind of audience does Miller represent? The coolly discerning listener who has heard a lot before and is not too easily impressed. Hyperbole is an occupational hazard in jazz; its adepts spend too much time trying to convince everyone that every competent technician who comes down the pike is a great innovator or a unique stylist. Miller has never been easily snowed. His writing is devoid of superlatives. Musicians notice this and are not delighted by it, which is one reason Miller is not as beloved by Canada’s jazz musicians as you might expect. They forget the decades he spent reminding the world of their existence and remember only his damnably faint praise. In this sense, perversely, it will be easier to measure the true value of his contribution now that he os no longer making it a few times a week.

But there are the books. His first, 1982’s Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, was a classic almost as soon as it was printed, a set of sketches of the country’s prominent players, by the palsied standards of “prominence” in Canadian jazz: Wray Downes, Brian Barley, P.J. Perry. It set a strong theme in Miller’s writing: a fondness for underdogs over stars, a firm conviction that jazz is an outsider’s music. At its least attractive, this has translated into a consistent tendency for Miller to become gloomy about any musician—Wynton Marsalis, Diana Krall, Oscar Peterson—who becomes prominent outside jazz fandom’s gated community. At its most attractive, it leads him to champion rugged individuality and the musicians who display it.

There are only so many obscure Canadian jazz musicians to champion, however, and a few years ago Miller pretty much checked them all off with his Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz. What to do for an encore? Extend two of his running themes: underdogs on one hand, and jazz in strange places (Canada is, if you’re not a Canadian, a strange place) on the other.

The result is Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914–1929. It seeks to answer one of the music’s central questions: how a regionally concentrated and at first ill-defined American vernacular music swept the world. I say it seeks to answer because to some extent the question is unanswerable. Jazz did its world-sweeping before it had been widely recorded or taken seriously by most observers. So accounts of early jazz musicians abroad are spotty and hobbled by the fact that listeners literally had no vocabulary to describe what they were hearing.

The Australian novelist David Malouf has pointed out that his country’s early artists of European origin could not draw the local flora and fauna accurately because, for generations, they could hardly believe they were seeing these creatures. There is a bit of this in the early jazz accounts Miller quotes here. “Nobody but six negro eccentric players could shatter so many rules of a well-integrated band and make it so enticing to an audience,” a reviewer for the Victoria Daily Colonist declared after a performance by Freddie Keppard’s New Orleans Creole Ragtime Band in 1916. The musicians showed “seemingly absolute indifference to what the other man was doing but they always managed to arrive at appointed places in full accord.” Well, thanks, but modern readers have to fill in a lot of blanks to understand what the reviewer was on about.

So the early history of jazz is by its nature anecdotal. Miller responds by spinning anecdotes: his book is divided into dozens of short chapters that piece together, from news accounts and correspondence, the visits of proto-jazz bands to London, Paris, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and other locales. Louis Mitchell, a drummer who spent 15 years in London and Paris, is the recurring character. But along the way we also catch glimpses of the greats: cornetist Keppard, bandleader James Reese Europe, saxophonist Sidney Bechet. They had some wild times. Many were amazed at the respect they received abroad, respect that was hardly guaranteed to black or even white jazzmen, at that time or since.

Miller surveys their comings and goings in brisk prose that gets the job done without drawing undue attention to itself (“Dave Tough was, as usual, hungover”). The only real weakness in the book, apart from the spottiness of the historical record, is the absence of any attempt to demonstrate what other globalizing popular-art movements the early jazzmen were competing against. Miller mentions tango bands in passing; one assumes there were also travelling cowboy shows, Cuban exotica, fakirs and spellcasters from assorted locales. Even by 1916 it was hardly unheard of for musicians to take their acts very far afield, but it is easy to forget that when reading Miller.

Still, Some Hustling This shines new light on the early road life for a music that will always give a central role to the road and the one-night stand. Jazz fans can rejoice at the prospect of the concentrated doses of scholarship Miller’s books will offer from now on. But I am left mourning its absence, even in shorter and less pristine form, from the morning paper. It used to be a newspaper’s goal to get specialized knowledge to a general audience. Now, apparently, it is not. The commons has shrunk once again.