Speculating on what exactly makes a successful jazz biography is a game for fools. Readers of jazz histories, like listeners to jazz records, aren’t always after the same thing. Who, for example, wants to wade through hundreds of years of painstakingly-traced ancestry when it bogs down a narrative even before it’s begun? Likewise, who but the truly nerdy needs a treatise on matters musical so detailed that it requires a degree in Higher Mathematics to comprehend? Or how about one of those deathless itineraries that turns a life into a list? Oft-times, less truly is more. And, as with musical notes, how things are pitched is everything. Spend too much time in one era, or dwelling on one particular record, and the whole is off-kilter; too little and you begin to suspect a certain lack of application on the part of the author. Yet therein lies the rub; big lives will almost always require some sort of reduction to fit within the pages of a truly readable book. But how much paring down must there be? How far does one go before ending up with the look of a hastily-penned celebrity life story, big print and all? Moreover, how much should a biographer’s own tastes impinge on the telling of a good tale? He or she may act as a guide, surely, but as a judge, jury and executioner without impunity? And can anyone who hasn’t effectively ‘walked the walk’ truly qualify to take on such a role anyway?
The reason I’m asking these questions again (and as a biographer of a well-known jazz musician myself I’ve asked them time and again believe me) is because I’ve just finished reading a book that, up until a few days ago, I would’ve imagined to be catnip for a tenor saxophonist. Had it been exactly that I’d now be writing a breathless encomium. As it is I’m left contemplating something akin to tearing off a letter of complaint. Scrub that; perhaps that should read a communique of congratulations, because the author responsible for the book under scrutiny has succeeded in doing the one thing I had hitherto imagined to be impossible with his subject; taking a musician legendary for the personality of his sound and reducing him, via a combination of half-arsed understanding, parrot-fashion cliché and cloth-ears, to something dangerously close to a caricature. Examined by one of the coldest writer’s touches I’ve ever come across, Ben Webster – tenor saxophone god and possessor of one of the most seductively erotic voices this side of, frankly, the amorous boudoir – emerges if not exactly dessicated from J. de Valk’s biography, then certainly a little frost-bitten. Anyone able to pull off such a feat has a talent, certainly. Whether it’s a talent to be applauded is quite another thing.
‘Ben Webster: His Life and Music’ (Berkeley Hills, 2001) is hardly news. Indeed, keeping to the pattern of reviewing things so far after their initial appearance that I’m relatively safe from sales-curious Googling, this is a book I ought to have read when it was first published, if only to add yet a further layer to my long-held belief that most jazz biographies are written not by those best qualified to do so but simply by those who think of writing them first.
Before I venture deeper into this argument, and poke an accusing finger through the paper-thin assumptions this study is built around, let me say this; de Valk’s first language is Dutch not English and consequently we’re reading a translation, a switch which suggests to me that what is clunky, awkward and poorly reasoned in a second tongue can only be much, much worse in the first. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t the stuff of ‘Monty Python’s Hungarian Phrasebook. I don’t doubt for a minute that de Valk has expressed these sentiments, but no matter the language I feel they still require some explanation. I must admit, however, that I’ve not had much inclination to find out more about Mr. de Valk, a decision which rather leaves him at the mercy of what I can ascertain from his words on Webster alone. I doubt very much that he is a tenor saxophonist – not that being one is a mandatory requirement to write about same. It can help though. I’m equally dubious as to how much time he had spent truly listening to those he both critiques and quotes, and by listening I really mean digesting rather than merely reacting to.
In an essay a few years ago I wrote, using a rather crude image but one nonetheless fit for purpose, that the non-playing jazz writer is in the same position of a eunuch at an orgy. On one level he understands perfectly that which he is privy to. On another it’s a total mystery; the human urge, the desire to connect, the drama – yes! - of the climax is alien to him. He looks on and can describe what he sees to some effect but he’ll never be an active participant. Ben Webster, in this instance, is the lover. His biographer might well be cast as the deferential onlooker, watching, waiting, willingly accepting his observational position were it not for his fitful interruptions and troubling opinions as to his master’s technique, choice of partners and overall performance.
The faults in this book aren’t, let’s be clear, Ben Webster’s. No, he lumbers his way through these pages to good enough purpose, half-man, half-bottle, doing no more than is required of him; that is being himself, warts and all. The only misfortune that befalls him – unknowingly and posthumously, of course – is for his path to have crossed that of a writer who simply isn’t equipped to tackle his subject. Ben’s see-sawing character and incontestable in-person legacy are documented in dozens of Webster tropes, both familiar and obscure (and what a fund of Jekyll and Hyde stories they are), but the trouble is de Valk keeps putting himself between reader and subject, making decisions on our behalf, skewing the narrative to his own ends, largely through ignorance, and taking pot-shots at jazzmen he doesn’t much like the look of as if he were some sort of artistic sentry. Worse still, displays of empathy aren’t merely fleeting, they’re all but invisible, an omission that makes a book about a very human being read rather like a psychological report card. Webster drinks too much when around his old friends or out of frustration, we hear time and again, with nary a deeper attempt to look at motivation, or an understanding of what pressures he may have truly been subjected to. Sometimes we stop just short of ‘must try harder.’ The backstories of race, fiscal insecurity, and of the weight of creating a life from the fabric of improvisation aren’t really factored in. On the odd occasion when they are, the words seem functional rather than feelingful, almost as if Webster himself was the problem and the wider social milieu and concomitant issues were so much fluff. When the tenorist starts asking for fees commensurate with his status and such remuneration wasn’t forthcoming, de Valk appears to side with the sharks. It’s not a good look.
This is the book’s greatest crime, you see; de Valk clearly doesn’t do feelings, at least not anyone else’s feelings. His childish dismissals of albums in which others have long found much of merit is merely snobbish; his reduction of players he feels ill-suited to his idealised version of Webster is plain silly (Art Tatum is actually called ‘Mr. Busy Fingers’ at one point); his prejudice towards virtually any rhythm section that isn’t the Oscar Peterson Trio is sophomoric – these are all forgivable gaffs. A more experienced jazz writer might have weighed these points more subtly. Rarely though does he pause to consider any sort of counterbalance. His is the only way, the only voice, the only arbiter. It feels a bit like jazz dictatorship in paperback form. Witness his treatment of European musicians, who in general come in for a very hard time whoever they are, with everyone from the Alex Welsh band (‘a dull little group’) through organist Alan Haven (‘deadly boring’) to, de Valk’s particular bête noir, pianist Frans Wieringa, getting sniffy short-shrift (he attacks ‘At Ease’ the album Webster made with the young Dutchman in 1969 not once but on three separate occasions, as if determined to finish with a head shot what he’d begun with a gentle slap).
Perhaps more than any other critical outburst, this angle reveals how badly de Valk reads his subject, and, moreover, how he fails to understand the life of a working jazz musician. Accompanied by anything less than an A-Grade trio, Webster’s records are largely written off, a sweeping indictment that fails to grasp a fundamental truth about not only the saxophonist but of jazz itself. Touring musicians don’t always have the luxury of choosing their own team – this de Valk glibly acknowledges – yet he sees this sort of format as nothing but an almighty drag for the man out front, forgetting that by the late-1960s Webster had been on the road for over thirty-five years and knew exactly how to get the best out of any musical situation that presented itself. Perhaps reluctantly de Valk notes this; Webster’s narrowing of repertoire and repetition of personal variations (‘once he had found an “ideal” solo, he usually saw no need to make revisions’) was evidence of a canny mind at work, not proof he was a worn-out showman low on ideas.
And it’s this the human element that this book lacks in spades. de Valk just doesn’t think, feel or tell a story like a jazzman would, a deep irony when one considers that his chosen subject was one of the finest narrative-unfurling musicians the idiom has ever seen. The plot here is far far bigger than the man telling it, and that’s why, for me, this book puffs itself out so quickly. If Webster gets drunk, it’s not an act requiring forensic censure. If he makes an album with a slightly dodgy bassist, it’s not necessarily a failed attempt. Nor is every recording that sits outside the author’s very narrow qualifications of excellence one that we should ignore. On this point, his section ‘Records in the decade 1964-1973’ is required reading for anyone who wants a masterclass in subjective nothingness. Elsewhere, he also finds little to praise in the glorious summit meeting with Benny Carter and Barney Bigard ‘BBB & co’ (1962), one of the finest mainstream records of the decade, which nobody with even the most modest pair of ears could swipe past. ‘The Soul of Ben Webster’ (1958), among the best examples of both the leader’s eclecticism (it features modernist trumpeter Art Farmer) and composing, with themes that are at times genuinely startling, is likewise pooh-poohed as ‘a routine jam session’. So confident is this fobbing off that I’m not entirely sure if de Valk has heard the same record as the rest of us. But then again, we are dealing here with someone who expresses mystification at Webster’s own choice of favourite recording, his majestic 1956 album with pianist Art Tatum, this reaction fully disclosing the awkward truth that, like so many jazz biographers, de Valk has written a book placing his own preferences and perceived truths above those of the man he appraises.
The question of respect comes into play. Distance is one thing, yet when one feels that the author is looking at his subject not from a place of parity but from somewhere above then all sorts of nagging suspicions begin to formulate. Was Ben Webster really only a peripatetic drunkard who couldn’t earn enough money to buy his own property? Was he actually only a temporary genius, whose best work was so scattered as to have occurred more by chance than design? Was he, as de Valk insinuates several times, his own worst enemy, a figure who, when all the elegant balladry was folded away for the night, reverted to a man-child who needed his landlady to glue the rest of his life together? We learn all these things from de Valk’s account; my worry is there’s a thinly hidden laughter at Webster’s expense when we read them, with the saxophonist finding himself the victim of the ‘and then he did this or that outrageous thing’ folklore that insults the intelligence of all concerned. Ben Webster is by no means alone in this; jazz is full of such ‘funny’ reductions, from Charlie Parker wandering about naked in a hotel lobby to Phil Seamen vomiting on his own snare drum during a ballad and then spending a full five minutes swishing his own sick with a pair of brushes in full view of a packed concert hall. These things aren’t funny at all; they’re tragic. Some biographers don’t believe so and they lack the prudence to deal with such blights as alcohol, aggression and melancholy – Ben Webster’s deadly self-made cocktail – in a sensitive manner. Or possibly, they too enjoy the certainty that they themselves would never be so foolish as to be caught by such demons.
And we’re back in the room, asking the same question we began with; how much of a biographer’s own voice is necessary within their work? Is it needed at all? Objectivity is a pre-requisite, I believe; no hagiography ever delivered a lasting view of any one important figure in jazz. Yet, beneath the judicious handling of anecdotes, on-record examples and contemporary critical reactions, there surely must be a solid foundation of respect, not only for the music under discussion but for all those who made it, famous or not? Telescoping this point, one might argue that the deeper one understands the lifestyle and experiences of a jazz musician, and of the context in which they apprenticed and refined their talents, the less inclined one might be to dispatch a single night’s work as a worthless sideshow, as is de Valk’s default. Jazz is, after all, a continuum, full of ups and downs and patches both fallow and purple. It is patently not a sequence of set-pieces, classic albums and game-changing gigs. No working jazz performer would ever tell you that. But then again, you’d have to be listening, truly listening, to hear what they’re saying. And to seek for a pattern in which your chosen idol delivers every night, doesn’t fuck up, or disport the scars of real life, is to look for that which doesn’t exist. Jazz musicians may well be idealists, yet what makes their ideals work is they play them out in environments so very far from controlled. Contrast, as Ben Webster proved time and again in all those light and shade solos, is as important as consistency. This book though seeks only the highs, which can only ever lead to a false impression. And whether you’re a jazz saxophonist or the chronicler of spurious histories, life’s just not like that.
‘Ben Webster: His Life and Music’ is a qualified success then; a victory only in the physical sense that the book exists, it contains a wealth of good anecdotes and it makes some attempt to codify a sprawling, at times chaotic, existence. My only beef is that I don’t think the author was the man to do it. Reading him sniping at Art Tatum, or questioning the abilities of many of those who his subject chose to work with, or calling out as substandard recordings that can still teach us much fifty-five years after their maker’s death, is rather like witnessing a solitary ant nibbling at a bull elephant’s toe. Your eyes will always return to the elephant.