Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White

By Gene Lees

Book Overview

It was none other than Louis Armstrong who said, "These people who make the restrictions, they don't know nothing about music. It's no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow." "You can't know what it means to be black in the United States--in any field," Dizzy Gillespie one said, but Gillespie vigorously objected to the proposition that only black people could play jazz. "If you accept that premise, well then what you're saying is that maybe black people can only play jazz. And black people, like anyone else, can be anything they want to be."

In Cats of Any Color, Gene Lees, the acclaimed author of three previous collections of essays on jazz and popular music, takes a long overdue look at the shocking pervasiveness of racism in jazz's past and present--both the white racism that long ghettoized the music and generations of talented black musicians, and what Lees maintains is an increasingly virulent reverse racism aimed at white jazz musicians. In candid interviews, living jazz legends, critics, and composers step forward and share their thoughts on how racism has affected their lives. Dave Brubeck, part Modoc Indian, discusses native Americans' contribution to jazz and the deeply ingrained racism that for a time made it all but impossible for jazz groups with black and white players to book tours and television appearances. Horace Silver looks back on his long career, including the first time he ever heard jazz played live. Blacks were not not allowed into the pavilion in Connecticut where Jimmie Lunceford's band was performing, so the ten-year-old Silver listened and watched through the wooden slats surrounding the pavilion. "And oh man That was it " Silver recalls. Red Rodney recalls his early days with Charlie "Bird" Parker, and pianist and composer Cedar Walton tells of the time Duke Ellington played at the army base at Ford Dix and allowed the young enlisted Walton to sit in. Tracing the jazz world's shifting attitude towards race, many of the stories Lees tells are inspiring--Brubeck cancelling 23 out of 25 concert dates in the South rather than replace black bass player Eugene Wright, or Silver insisting that while he strives to provide his fellow black musicians opportunities, "I just want the best musicans I can get. I don't give a damn if they're pink or polka dot." Others are profoundly disturbing--Lees' first encounter with Oscar Peterson, after a Canadian barber flatly refused to cut Peterson's hair, or Wynton Marsalis on television claiming that blacks have been held back for so many years because the music business is controlled by "people who read the Torah and stuff."

From the old shantytowns of Louisville, to the streets of South Central L.A., to the up-to-the-minute controversies surrounding Marsalis's jazz program at Lincoln Center, and the Jazz Masters awards given by the NEA, Cats of Any Color confronts racism head-on. At its heart is a passionate plea to recognize jazz not as the sole property of any one group, but as an art form celebrating the human spirit--not just for the protection of individual musicians, but for the preservation of the music itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195084489
• ISBN13: 9780195084481
• Release Date: November 1994
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Meditation of Jazz and Race

Gene Lees' bok had its genesis as a series of articles nominally written around a common theme, that of race and jazz. The're no real narrative structure here; some of the pieces are narratives, some more essays and some are just rememberances that sort of meander here and there.They're very readable, although I do get a little annoyed at times by Lees' short, punchy newspaper style, with two and three word sentances and one-sentance paragraphs. It's a technique that is best used very sparingly. Lees does do a superb job of recreating conversations, showing that he has a marvelous ear for the rhythms and conventions of spoken English. The unifying theme through all these pieces is Gene Lees' concern with the role race played in jazz, whether the early racism that kept Black jazz musicians out of the limelight, or the contemporary racism of people like Stanley Crouch who proclaim jazz to be Black music. What puts Lees' essays a cut above others who have written on this topic is that he goes beyond the simple enumerating of players and their opinions; he has a real musicologist's interest in the history of jazz and popular music. One piece, an extended profile and interview Dominique d Lerma is devoted to breaking the stereotypes of the earliest jazz music. If you watched Ken Burns' history of jazz you could be forgiven for thinking that jazz came from ill-educated, poor Southern blacks. de Lerma emphasizes, for example, the role of conservatory-trained Black musicians who integrated the harmonies of the European composers they studied into the popular music of the times, and the role of the great Black music publisher W. C. Handy in popularizing this music. The last essay is specifically devoted to Wynton Marsalis, a man with marvelous technique and shallow opinions, who refuses to admit that any white musician has contributed anything to jazz, thus bringing the debate full circle. Marsalis is a trumpter with a brilliant classical technique who unfortunately has been elevated in recent years to the position of being the modern savior of jazz by the efforts of Burns and Stanley Crouch despite his not having much of anything original since his early days as an up-and-comer with Art Blakey's band. Unfortunately he has come to be viewed as a major figure and authority in jazz by outsiders, despite being generally ignired as disparaged by most jazzers. The real pity of attitudes like Marsalis' is that they lose sight of the fact that while Jazz certainly had its origins in Black musicians, it has always been as much an American music form as a Black form, and that today it is an international form that transcends boundries of either race or color. The greatest musicians have always ignored artificial boundries, and many of the great bands of the post WW-II always included musicians of all races. It takes nothing away from Ray Brown to say he was influenced by Scott LaFaro, or that Miles Davis was strongly influenced by his close association with Gil Ev

An intelligent and thoughtful book, marvelously written.

Gene Lees has steadily built a reputation as one of the finest of all writers on jazz. This intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful look at current attitudes on the part of jazz musicians towards race and racial bias is firmly grounded in historical research without being pedantic. Part of the success of this book comes from its organization -- many of the chapters are profiles of musicians and musical scholars which are incidentally used to illustrate the issues under consideration. Whether or not one finally agrees with Lees' premise -- that we have reentered a period of "reverse racism" in jazz -- the quality of the interviews and interviewees makes this an important book, and a wonderful read in the process.