Like Young:Jazz, Pop, Youth,and Middle Age
By Francis Davis. Da Capo Press, 268 pages, $26.

You (or at least I) don’t read most collections of jazz reviews front to back in sequence. You skip around according to mood and inclination — the Coltrane piece, the Cecil Taylor piece, the Bix Beiderbecke piece. Francis Davis’s new Like Young: Jazz, Pop, Youth, and Middle Age reads best in sequence. Maybe that’s because whereas his first three collections brought together shorter pieces from varied sources, usually newspapers (the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Village Voice, the Phoenix), Like Young draws many of its entries from the Atlantic, where Davis has been a contributing editor since 1992. The pieces are longer, and the subject matter itself is more varied, going beyond his usual scope, jazz, to include pieces on pop (Dylan, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, and others) and a couple of travel essays. With the encouragement of former Atlantic editor William Whitworth and, perhaps, with the experience of a single-subject book-length piece (The History of the Blues) under his belt, Davis has had a chance to flex his muscle with longer narratives. A lovely travel piece about his annual August vacation to Santa Cruz, California (with his wife, NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross), serves as a fulcrum, a transition from jazz into pop; and the book concludes with a previously uncollected piece from 1989 about Dion DiMucci. Davis has long combined Gary Giddins’s musical acuity with Whitney Balliett’s literary flair. He’s also one of the few jazz critics I know of who can make good jokes in print. Like Young secures the value of his prose as literature.

There’s another difference in this collection — though the individual pieces are often longer than in past books, they’re also often longer than they were when they first appeared. If Davis has harsher things to say about Eric Nisenson’s book on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album than you recall from reading the piece in the New Yorker, that’s because he’s restored some of the nastier bits that were cut — as well as revised the ending and changed the title. (The original was " Blue Heaven: The Making of Miles Davis’s Masterpiece " ; the new one is " The Sound of One Finger Snapping. " )

" A book gives you the liberty to kind of ease into a subject, " Davis tells me when he’s in town to talk about Like Young. " Whereas a magazine is kind of a department store of ideas: you have to grab the person before he walks off into the foreign-policy section or the movie section. In a book, you have the person, more or less. "

Davis, who says he has " a regrettable tendency to turn things in way over length, " found that when he wrote the Miles piece, he was living in the world of the " old " New Yorker, where pieces could run on ad infinitum. The slams at Nisenson were obvious cuts in a piece that merely used his book and one by Ashley Kahn as the occasion for an essay about Davis and his benchmark LP.

" One of the nice things about putting together collections, " Davis goes on, " is that you can look and see what you left out — if you still stand by it and if it will still fit back in. And sometimes it doesn’t, because the piece has acquired a different rhythm by that point. " Even the finale of the Miles article took on a new clarity. " It was just plain to me what I had wanted to say, " Davis says, laughing, " when it hadn’t been. "

If his title has an elegiac feel, the book doesn’t come across as the gripes of a cranky, middle-aged man. And if much of the book is about looking back (at Frank Sinatra, at Dion and the Belmonts, at the jazz of the ’70s), it’s also a meditation on nostalgia and time itself. Davis’s profiles — particularly those of Dion and the jazz singer/songwriter/pianist Dave Frishberg — take place over time, over several visits, in Frishberg’s case over several years. Working with Whitworth, he realized that he wanted to be honest about this. " Sometimes what you’re trying to do in a piece is set a mood as much as convey information. And, especially to set a mood in trying to reveal someone’s character or personality, you need time. "

The mood of Like Young is expansive, and like the best essayists, Davis takes in the world through his chosen subject (Dylan serves as a springboard for discussing not only cultural revisionism but political revisionism). And he isn’t afraid to crack jokes at his own expense: " Friends think I’m joking when I say that I once thought Britney Spears was a porn star and Daisy Fuentes one of those female Third World novelists I really ought to try reading. " Like Young is about music and culture and politics — about Francis Davis’s life and times. Or as he calls music criticism in his introduction, " autobiography by other means. "

Issue Date: December 6-13, 2001

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