• Title: NYT Essential Library: Jazz
• Author: Ben Ratliff
• Genre/Subject: Jazz music history
• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication Date: 2002
• Start date: 1/30/24
• Finish date: 7/26/24

Review:

An impulse buy that really showed its age. Published in 2002 in the days of compact discs, before streaming, before even iTunes or the iPod. The subtitle is A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important (Jazz) Recordings and it was exactly that. Now in 2024 the whole world of music is an entirely different landscape and sadly this is, well not obsolete, but largely irrelevant. Very few people are going to look up the label number for an obscure 3 CD set published in 1997, and I for sure never will.

So with that said, there was still a lot that was of value in this so it’s not heading for the landfill any time soon. Ben Ratliff was the jazz and pop critic at the New York Times from 1996 to 2016 and they don’t give that job to hack writers or people that don’t know what they are writing about. So the writing was excellent, if a bit repetitive, but how can you avoid that when you have to write 100 individual reviews about jazz music?

And… how do you pick the 100 most important jazz recordings without offending by omission? You can’t, and judging from the reviews on Amazon there are very few people besides me who understand this simple fact. “How could he leave out Blingie McGillicuddy’s classic songs of the chainsaw?” *clutches pearls*

So the usual standards are here: A Love Supreme, Kind of Blue, Money Jungle, Monk Alone, you know the ones that everyone with grey hair in a ponytail drops into conversation at fashionable cocktail parties that I never get invited to. But that doesn’t begin to cover the range of this book, they have to be included but so do a host of others that I had no experience with.

The author knows his subject extraordinarily well, I mean that comes with being the NYT jazz critic but it still was an impressive show of knowledge without pretensions or excessive erudition, lovely.

I read this a few pages every day or two which explains how long it took me to finish, but this is a good thing. I was able to read, listen to a selection and then absorb what I had read and listened to. If you start with Fletcher Henderson and then read straight through to Dave Holland you’ll never remember half of the content, if that much.

So yeah, good book, good selection, good reading and an introduction to some great music. Recommend? Not really as it’s horribly dated now but I do recommend checking out Ben Ratliff and his other books on jazz and music.