MONDAY
E-mail a friendBen Ratliff
airdate November 12, 2008
Ben Ratliff has been a jazz critic at The New York Times since '96. The Manhattan-based writer has also penned several books on the genre, including The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, Jazz: A Critics Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings and Coltrane, which was described as the book to read about genius, talent and influence in the post-modern age. His latest work is The Jazz Ear, for which he sat down with 15 living legends to discuss recordings by the musicians who most influenced them.
Jazz critic describes the current state of jazz after the loss of so many icons and explains what is needed for it to survive. (2:48)
Full interview. (11:57)
Ben Ratliff
Tavis Smiley: Ben Ratliff is the jazz critic for "The New York Times" and the author of the bestselling book, "Coltrane." His latest is a collection of conversations and pieces he's written for the "Times," featuring a who's who of the jazz world. The book is called "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music." Ben Ratliff, nice to have you on the program.
Ben Ratliff: Thank you.
Tavis: It's good to see you.
Ratliff: Good to be here.
Tavis: Let me start with perhaps an unlikely question to commence our conversation. I know the 15 people that you did talk to. Who is no longer here who you would liked to have talked to?
Ratliff: Of anybody?
Tavis: Of anybody.
Ratliff: Well, I regret that I never got a chance to do this with Elvin Jones, the drummer for Coltrane's group, because he changed jazz as much as anybody. But because he wasn't a famous band leader, maybe people don't think of him in quite that way. But his relation to rhythm was so fascinating and so important to jazz that I'm certain that if we had done this exercise together, listening to music and talking about it as we heard it, I know that I would have understood more about him.
That was the point of this whole series of articles I wrote in the paper. I got tired of writing pieces about musicians that were keyed to a new record, because in jazz, records are sort of not the point. Jazz is this evolving thing and it's a music all about revising and changing, and it's always moving. And I just found that in social situations where I would be listening to music with a musician, I would watch their face light up at certain points in the music, or they'd fix on certain things.
And I'd go, "Oh, that's what you hear, that's what you're focusing on," and that became the basis for a conversation.
Tavis: Let me ask a strange question -- this'll be the second question tonight that's strange. How does one become -- I'm asking you to set your humility aside for just a second -- how does one become a reputable jazz critic? Jazz is something that we all try to hear, we try to appreciate, we try to understand. Jazz is deep. How does one become a reputable jazz critic?
Ratliff: By listening. There's no other way. It helps to be able to play an instrument, at least just a little bit, to have some vocabulary for taking music apart and seeing what's really there, but it's listening. It's listening a lot. And if you do it at a certain point in your life, maybe when you're young, sort of day and night for a couple of years in a row, that's sort of all you need.
Also going out to hear music live is very, very important. Jazz is this -- it's a performance art. Like I said earlier, it doesn't live quite as much on records, so I think listen to a lot of jazz and go hear a lot of live jazz, and that's how you find out.
Tavis: Over the last couple of years, as you know, because I've read your pieces about them, the last couple of years we've lost some giants in the jazz world -- Max Roach comes to mind immediately. Your sense of the state of jazz, given that we're losing, pretty quickly here, some of the icons? And one could argue that with the exception of a couple of people, the icons, at least from back in the day, are gone now.
Ratliff: Yeah. Well, jazz is in a funny moment. Its big, cultural moment may have passed. I wouldn't argue against that. We want things -- in popular culture, in entertainment, we want things fast and succinct, and jazz takes a while. Jazz is sort of always going somewhere. It doesn't just declare what it's all about in two and a half minutes.
And yes, all these people have died, but also in an earlier time, up until the early '60s, the media was much more focused on jazz. There was a time when jazz was just about semi-popular. Well, it was popular further back, in swing era, but then in the late '50s and early '60s, it was sort of semi-popular. Now it's not even that.
But there's tons of musicians, young musicians coming out of music schools, more so than ever before. There's been this great explosion of jazz education since the '70s, and a lot of these young musicians don't have enough gigs, they don't have enough places to go, but tons of people are playing jazz now, and I still hear great musicians all the time that I've never heard of before.
Tavis: How does an art form survive if the audience appreciating that art form is dying or dwindling?
Ratliff: It just does. It does through the musicians that keep on doing it, and jazz is something that's always going to have a small core audience that's understanding it. It's a funny thing. The big record companies are going away, but that doesn't matter to jazz, because jazz people don't record for big record companies anymore.
Circuit City has gone out of business, but that doesn't matter because you couldn't really buy jazz records there anyway. It's all about going -- jazz needs jazz clubs to survive, it really does. It needs places where people can come together in a kind of casual setting and enjoy themselves and listen.
Tavis: "The Jazz Ear," the name of the book, the jazz ear is what? Not the book itself -- how would you describe the jazz ear?
Ratliff: Well, there's not only one kind. Each musician had a very different ear, and they surprised me with what they chose to listen to. I kind of had a set of rules that stayed constant for all these 15 pieces, and that was the musician chooses all the music, and the music can't be anything that they've played on. So I never knew what I was going to get.
Wayne Shorter chose symphonic music by Ralph Vaughn Williams, the English composer, and Dianne Reeves, who's a great jazz singer, chose -- her choices were interesting. I thought for sure she was going to choose Sarah Vaughan. No Sarah Vaughan -- she chose some singer-songwriter music, and in general she chose music whose words were really important to her, and it turned out, to my surprise, that she was really fascinated by kind of the written word and the meaning of words and how you can relay that in a performance.
Tavis: I got the sense you were taken by that a little bit in part because, I would suspect, jazz doesn't celebrate lyrical content the way that other music forms do.
Ratliff: No, not so much -- it's an instrumental thing, yeah. And this is why I think so much important information, so much important stuff among musicians and jazz fans is communicated sort of wordlessly, so getting some of these musicians to really take apart what it is that they're reacting to in certain pieces of music was an interesting process.
Tavis: Speaking of interesting, what was interesting for me, when Herbie Hancock won the Grammy award for best album of the year, he came on the program before and after. But I recall talking to him in one of those conversations then about the fact that he had never really -- as a jazz artist, he never paid attention to lyrical content until he did "The Joni Letters."
And then when he actually paid attention to what Joni had written, he said it opened up his eyes to a whole nother way of appreciating the music and the content, lyrically as well as musically.
Ratliff: Sure. Well, it's like jazz is over here, the singer-songwriter tradition is over here. Most singers in jazz are singing words that were written long ago, and they're using the words as sound. They may not be as interested in exactly what they mean. But yeah, it's a whole different thing.
Tavis: Your point in doing a book like this for the average, everyday person, the value in "The Jazz Ear" is what, as you see it?
Ratliff: Well, I think that what connects us all, musicians and audiences, is listening, and I want to understand how musicians think. I want to understand what's behind the mystery of what they do. And since you can't be a brain surgeon and find out what's in there, I just found the best way to do it was through a shared listening process.
Because music sort of reveals itself by degrees, so we'd be sitting there together and time would pass, and the music keeps going on. And as it was going on, we would follow it together. So it was just about connecting with people I respect and am interested in through the ear.
Tavis: Beyond what we've already talked about -- here's the exit question -- beyond the fact that it's more music than it is lyric, we've addressed that already -- and I'm not sure you feel this way, so I don't want to put words in your mouth. But if, in fact, you did or do feel this way, that is to say that jazz is uniquely different and uniquely better than most other music art forms, it would be uniquely better why?
Ratliff: Well, I'm not so sure that I feel that, but I think jazz is special because of improvisation, because of the ethic of improvisation that's all through it, top to bottom. But jazz is also special because of jazz is sort of like a sum of the great practitioners who each invented their own musical language, and that musical language keeps compounding and rolling into a bigger and bigger snowball until now, somebody just finishing a jazz performance program in university has got an idea of jazz that's vast.
It's not what it was in the '20s or the '40s or the '60s or the '80s; it's huge, and it connects to all these other different languages.
Tavis: My time is up, and not that you asked, Ben, but the thing, in addition to what you said, the thing I love about jazz is, that I came to appreciate, is that everybody in the group finds his or her own voice.
Ratliff: That's true, yeah.
Tavis: Everybody does -- nobody's telling you what to do. You get in where you fit in, you find your own voice, you do your own thing. As a result, it all sounds good together.
Ratliff: Yeah.
Tavis: Yeah. I love it, I love it. Love the book. It's called "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music," written by the jazz critic for "The New York Times," Ben Ratliff. Conversations with 15 greats. Ben, nice to have you on the program.
Ratliff: Thank you.
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