Inverted Garden

Return to Buenos Aires

(Or, June 9th is...Guillermo Klein day)

From October 2007 to August 2008, I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working first as a reporter for the biweekly ex-pat newspaper The Argentimes and then as a jazz chronicler and scene hanger-on for All About Jazz. During most of my stay in the South, I kept an irregularly updated blog called Type and Tonic (the title was supposed to conjure a boozy Graham Greene ex-pat life) that covered my adventures in Patagonia, my thoughts on the difficulty of learning Spanish, and, increasingly, my time spent listening to Argentine jazz.

I never officially closed Type and Tonic, but after a blog post entiteld "June 9th is...Guillermo Klein day" I got a commission to write a piece for Down Beat on the post-crisis history of Buenos Aires jazz—a story of economic recovery, peripatetic musicians, and a perfect storm of art and commerce that gave birth to a new jazz idiom. Energized by the assignment—and delusional about its scope—I conducted 15 hours of interviews with the key Buenos Aires players, producers, and club owners in an attempt to capture the movement from all sides. By the time the piece was due, its word count had been slashed to 800, and what I'd envisioned as a lyrical feature ended up reading like the abstract to an encyclopedia entry.

For the last year and half, I've been stewing over the piece that could have been. I've written a 5,000 word draft of what I'd hoped to have published, then realized (after some helpful comments from Digital Dying's Justin Nobel) that the concept needed a make-over. I also realized I needed to go back to Argentina, both to make the story current again and to ask the questions that have peaked my curiosity over the last year.

I'm sitting in an apartment in San Telmo right now, having arrived in Buenos Aires this morning. Thanks to WBGO's Josh Jackson and freelance reporter Anil Mundra (formerly of the Global Post and NPR) I've grown the stubs of radio sea-legs and, for the next week, I'll be setting out to tell the story of Argentine jazz in a medium that's new to me.

I'm not sure how much blogging I'm going to be doing down here, but I'll try to file a few updates in this Type and Tonic revival/Inverted Garden double bill. I've already eaten a choripan and am headed off to a "puerta cerrada" jazz club tonight. It's suddenly feeling very June 2008...

Wynton in Vogue: Race and Luxury

The latest issue of Vogue features the above picture, an Annie Leibovitz-composed portrait of the ever-dapper King Wynton rehearsing with the JALC orchestra. A quick glance at the photo might leave one with the impression that it’s a standard glamour shot, but another look brings into focus a curiously sprawled blonde, almost camouflage against the teak floor. As Patrick Jarenwattananon asked when he posted a link to the photo on his NPR blog, “what's with the sitting woman?”

After reading Patrick’s question and looking at the photo, I began to grasp at the strands of a few possible answers—none of them positive for the music. After the initial surprise at seeing a pretty, well-dressed woman gazing at our unsuspecting hero, I found it hard to ignore the issue of race. Here is a powerful black man being ogled by a seemingly helpless white woman, a pairing rife with historical precedent from Kong to LeBron. While this photo doesn’t scream jungle rape like that infamous Vogue cover (note: same magazine), there’s a faint, unnerving echo played out in the way that Leibovitz arranges her principals. The woman looks both available and immobile (standing up from that pose would take some doing) and Marsalis towers above her. There’s a tragic history of objectifying black masculinity in the eyes of white femininity, and the photo's resonance with that history makes troubling Leibovitz’s decision to use a white model as smitten damsel before her black captor.

It’s also hard not to notice the privileging of white over black beauty: the photo might still smack of gender inequality with a black model, but it wouldn’t recall Jim Crow. In 1957, when Columbia Records showed Miles Davis the first LP cover to Miles Ahead, he famously quipped to producer George Avakian, “Why'd you put that white bitch on there?” Subsequent additions of the album showed a picture of Davis playing his horn and when Davis’s later album covers showed women, they were always black*. Annie Leibovitz is a powerful artist who gets her way, but if she had set-up a similar shoot for Miles, I imagine he’d have given her a cold stare and repeated what he said to Avakian. Marsalis might have considered a similar rebuke.

It’s easy to blame Leibovitz for these racial overtones, but there’s another possibility: perhaps Leibovitz, completely aware of what she’s doing, has merely given us an honest artistic interpretation of Marsalis. I think there’s plenty to admire about Wynton and Jazz at Lincoln Center: he’s an extraordinary musician (a fact that really sunk in after reading Ethan Iverson’s discussion of the Young Lions) and he’s built a home in which jazz is taken seriously and musicians are well paid, which, given the music’s history, is an epochal achievement. (I’d much rather listen to jazz at a small club than at Jazz at Lincoln Center, but if you were to have asked Thelonious Monk in 1952 if he’d rather keep playing that out-of-tune upright for less than a hundred bucks a night or play a Bösendorfer grand in a concert hall for a $10,000 fee, I’m inclined to think he would have bolted for JALC at the earliest chance.)

This advancement has come with a steep price, however, namely the commodification of jazz as a luxury good. Wynton poses in ads for Movado watches (he wears one in the photo as well) and leads an institution that rents space in a gilded corporate palace alongside New York’s two most expensive restaurants. Tickets to JALC are expensive and its patrons affluent, which makes for great business but a questionable breeding ground for great art. In this context, maybe the white woman isn’t a helpless Ann Darrow, but just another perfect accessory for jazz’s greatest salesman.

* Update: Commenter Il Maestro points out that the cover of Miles's Porgy and Bess (released after Miles Ahead) depicts the trumpeter and a white woman. Il Maestro says that the Marsalis photo reminded him first of the Porgy cover and I can see why. I responded at length to Il Maestro in the comments section and while I realize this post is walking some rather precarious interpretative ground, I think the Marsalis Vogue photo encapsulates a lot of ideas about Wynton, the JALC, and jazz history that make it worth exploring.

With respect to a comparison between Davis's Porgy cover and the Marsalis photo, I wrote this: "I did find the staging of the [Marsalis] photo indicative of the power imbalance of those old racist pairings—the helpless white woman gazing up at the big, mighty black man—and if I were to draw a separation between Miles's Porgy cover and the Wynton Vogue photo it would be on those grounds: Miles and his companion are clearly a couple, on the same level, and each occupying half of the frame."

Gary Giddins talks shop

One the rare occasions when critics get interviewed, they’re usually asked to weigh in on their subject of expertise, but hardly ever asked to discuss their craft. Charlie Rose will call on David Denby to talk about the top movies of the year, for instance, but Rose won’t ask Denby the kinds of probing questions about “process” that he would of a novelist or filmmaker. Modern critics, by and large, have been lumped into the opinion category alongside “talking heads," far beneath their august cousins in the arts. Many critics deserve this treatment—they’re shouting hacks or preening pundits—but a subset has always ranked among out best writers and deserve a more open forum to discuss their work.

That’s why I was so happy to see this lengthy interview with jazz critic Gary Giddins on the very worthwhile (and somewhat mysterious) website, Big Think (shorter clips from the interview are here). Giddins is the most prominent active jazz critic, having covered the music for 30 years at the Village Voice before transitioning to a life of occasional New Yorker essays and books on jazz history. Given Giddins’s forty-year jazz immersion, I figured he’d spend the interview talking about, well, jazz; but, much to my delight, he spends it talking about his bigger passion: writing.

Throughout the interview, especially in its first half, Giddins sets out to correct the notion that a critic is primarily an expert on his subject. A critic is a writer first, Giddins says, and an expert decidedly second. “I think all of us begin as writers,” he says, “you pick a subject that allows you to express yourself as a writer.” Listening to the music is important of course, Giddins adds, but the key to being a good critic is to “read voraciously” and to read “classic criticism.” It’s all common sense stuff, but it’s reassuring to hear a big-time critic state that he’s no musicologist and that his authority comes not from his grasp of music theory but from his capacity to describe music with precision and clarity.

Dispatch from the vocation of unhappiness: One of the most popular videos on Big Think is a clip from an interview with novelist John Irving entitled “Advice to Aspiring Novelists: Don’t Shoot Yourself.” That would be mildly depressing, but more depressing (and more deliciously ironic) is that Irving offers no such advice. He tells aspiring novelists that, if he were in their shoes, he might very well shoot himself.