All Frosting, No Cupcake

Published: Thu, 08/05/21

Advertisements for Myself: Introductions and Acknowledgments. Aside from being, to my ears, a kind of distant mashup of two Bill Evans phrases (song title "Re: Person I Knew" and album title Conversations With Myself), it's an enjoyably slippery, two-way reference to both the function of liner notes and the purpose of Davis' preface, as seen by a person with a long history of both reading and writing liner notes himself. Perhaps Miles Davis and John Coltrane were right, (Francis) Davis comments, to feel that the presence of liner notes at all implies an admission of failure on the artist's part: a verbal explanation ought to be superfluous if said artist has done his or her job properly and created music that communicates clearly.

And yet, as Davis readily points out, liner notes provide a way in for the listener, "an intellectual framework for the music...piecemeal jazz history." More to the point, they also give you "something to read on the bus ride home from the record store." This is probably why one of my favorite collections of jazz writing is still Tom Piazza's Setting The Tempo, which is literally just a collection of liner notes from fifty years' worth of jazz LPs. All frosting, no cupcake, yet in this digital era you can hop online and find just about anything discussed in the book in a matter of minutes, depending on what kind of peace you've made with art, commerce, the ownership of creativity and the ethics of streaming.

And that's kind of the point of reading about music: to find new music to listen to. Liner notes, as Davis observes, help provide a context for listening, to help newcomers to a particular artist understand a bit about where that artist stands in the kaleidoscopic history of twentieth-century popular music. So if this is the book that finally prompts me to investigate Sun Ra, shows me where to start with Charlie Haden, or helps me grasp just what it is about Dave Frishberg I find appealing, that'll be time well spent. And if I wind up reading yet another piece about Kind of Blue along the way or encounter a handful of pop essays about people I find interesting (Dylan and Elvis), people whose interestingness escapes me (Lou Reed) or people whose interestingness has yet to ring my chimes (Brian Wilson), that'll be cool too.

In the meantime, Davis has already done me the favor of opening a door into the music of Hoagy Carmichael by mentioning Blue Note's reissue of that songwriter's 1956 Pacific Jazz album Hoagy Sings Carmichael. The only thing better than hearing Carmichael's relaxed, unaffected delivery of his own material in the company of Harry Edison, Art Pepper and the like would be (no disrespect to Jimmy Rowles) hearing him play piano as well – that, and knowing who's playing the cool vibes part on "Winter Moon." Come to think of it, I'd be astonished if Dave Frishberg wasn't deeply familiar with Carmichael the singer. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

Hoagy Carmichael Playlist

More soon,

David