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.