By Steve Provizer

Other readers may be more sympathetic to this informative book’s broader conclusions about the rise of LP’s and the “erasure of black bodies and black aesthetics.”

At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz by Darren Mueller. Duke University Press, 448 pages, $31.95.

The books I read about jazz from the Academy usually demonstrate considerable research, but their illuminating findings are often filtered through an excessively narrow interpretive lens. Not  just filtered, really, but at times distorted: the power of the protagonists of the story are attenuated and, by my lights, facts are distorted to fit the Procrustean bed of a grand thesis.

In At The Vanguard of Vinyl (a title I don’t really understand), author Darren Mueller describes the movement from shellac 78’s to newer formats like the long-playing record (LP) and 45 rpm records. These developments paralleled and, to some extent, were made feasible by the development of recording on magnetic tape. Mueller claims that it has generally been accepted that the process came about much more quickly than it did. He goes on to explain why it took a decade for the LP format to triumph. This is a reasonably interesting premise and he has gathered compelling evidence to support this thesis. However, Mueller interprets these events in a particular way: “…records are the product of social structures and cultural schemas that surround the business and artistic creation of music making. Ideological underpinnings about sound, technology, race, race, gender and performance guide the decisions of record makers.” There is some truth to this, but it should not be accepted as a definitive explanation of a particular person’s behavior in a particular situation. It takes a lot of squeezing, minimizing, and adapting to make this explanation hold water.

For example, Mueller details the editing that George Avakian did on the recording Ellington at Newport. The heart and soul of that 1956 album, which rejuvenated Ellington’s career, was the performance of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” In particular, Paul Gonsalves’s 27 chorus tenor saxophone solo. Gonzalves choose the wrong mic for his solo — technological compensation had to be made. Crowd noise was also added. The author calls his editing intrusive, saying: “Avakian’s various activities in the 1950’s thus expose a particular record making blend of whiteness that centered white male norms and values in iterative fashion…This lens effectively distanced jazz from the broader black popular music by emphasizing the music’s greatness and lasting historical value.” Again, there’s some truth here, but it is unfair to completely characterize this affair as an unalloyed negative, given that the recording resurrected Ellington’s career.

Compare the author’s treatment of Avakian’s editing to how he describes the editing Charles Mingus did on the Jazz at Massey Hall LP (1953). Mingus thought his bass playing was under-recorded, so he overdubbed new bass parts, leaving the old part to ghost in the background. Mueller writes that it is unclear if he let any of his collaborators know of, or approve, his edits. He concludes that it was “a pervasive form of experimentation…his experimentations are a statement about control over his intellectual property…”  So, Avakian: intrusive. Mingus: experimental.

Reading this book was a bumpy ride. One page would intrigue or enlighten, the next frustrate, even infuriate. Mueller goes into just how important re-issues were during the initial stages of the development of the LP. They were cheap because old material was available to be repackaged in creative ways. This made me wonder: did the prevalence of re-releases mean that, in live performance, more old material would be performed? Historically, much new material in jazz came from musicals and film. Did the emphasis on marketing old jazz make it more possible for this older body of body to become a canon? Or did the proliferation of jazz recording in toto mean that more “originals” were recorded and performed?

Mueller underlines that the record industry did a lot of experimenting with musical genres in different formats. Record labels chose to feature jazz on LP’s, but tended to release R&B on 78‘s and 45’s. This fits with the points made in Jazz with a Beat, which I recently reviewed. Mueller says the exceptions were the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots — groups with crossover appeal. That said, it was perfectly logical to match jazz with LP’s, given that the length of most jazz performances was well beyond the 3 minute limit of 78’s. Mueller shows there was a concerted effort to cultivate a more upscale demographic that would buy into the higher price point of LP’s. That demographic was largely white and, because jazz worked well on LP’s, a lot of jazz marketing targeted that group. That seems clear. But did this process merely benefit white musicians, as Mueller posits, resulting in the “erasure of black bodies and black aesthetics.”

Mueller spends a lot of time parsing Bob Weinstock’s decision to use words like “new” and “modern” to hype his Prestige Records releases, suggesting that ”adopting such phrasing was also a clever way to brand the inexpensive labor of aspiring musicians eager for their first record deal. That is, this modernist language helped to downplay the capitalist concerns of record making…As was common for white male record collectors interested in the ‘modern,’ Weinstock used this kind of finesse marketing as a form of economic power.” Well, I suppose the producer was guilty of trying to sell records, but I consider this an acceptable tradeoff for the creation of the Prestige Record catalogue, most of which, to my knowledge, features Black musicians.

Weinstock’s efforts, the author goes on to assert, were part of a system that perpetuated a “violent structure of racism meant to exploit Black expertise, Black labor and Black capital…Eurological notions of historical tradition shaped the focus of critical and commercial attention in ways that normalized whiteness.“ Again, one can’t dismiss this point of out of hand: the record industry was and is part of a capitalist and racist culture. But putting it in such stark terms downplays any positive influence the record industry had on the careers of Black jazz musicians. It denies the possibility of the existence of purely altruistic motives, i.e, love of the music and of musicians of any race who played the music.

As noted, the information collected in At the Vanguard of Vinyl is welcome: there’s valuable nuts and bolts about the rise and fall of different recording formats and, at the end of each chapter, lists of representative recordings; there’s an eye-opening look at the skirmish over funding the US Information Agency program, which sent jazz “ambassadors” around the world; and an incisive examination of the role of Celia Mingus in Debut Records. Other readers may be more sympathetic to Mueller’s broader conclusions. For me, subsuming individual motivations to larger ineluctable cultural forces was too hard a polemical pill to swallow.

Steve Provizer writes on a range of subjects, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.