A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH ALL MUSIC GUIDE EDITOR, SCOTT YANOW


FJ: Let's start from the beginning.

SCOTT YANOW: I started about sixteen or so in high school. I looked in the LA Times one day and there was a listing that said there was a radio show that featured Dixieland. And I thought that Dixieland is a fun kind of music and I thought I would listen to it. It was actually on from 5-6 PM, Monday through Friday, back in the days when they had a bit more adventure in radio. I very quickly got adicted to that and for the first nine months or so, I gradually got up to swing. When I first went to college, people were wondering about me because they looked at my collection and I had 25 records and they would see Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong and think, "What is all this?" I had heard the names Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie before and I knew that they were supposed to be major players but I didn't know anything about them. I went into a used record store one day and for two dollars, I bought a Charlie Parker record that had among other songs, it had them doing "White Christmas." I said, "At least I know how this one goes." I had never heard of "Groovin' High," but at least with "White Christmas," the melody would sound familiar. I listened to that a couple of times everyday for a week and I didn't really care for it that much at first, but by the end of the week, I was into it. The doors were open and from then on, I was just really curious about all areas of jazz.


FJ: What was your assessment of bebop at that time?

SCOTT YANOW: At first I wasn't sure what they were doing. The doors kind of got open, but it was the idea that they were creating a melody and they were always being very creati.e Even though they were basically playing on chord changes, they were coming up with new ideas constantly.


FJ: So how do you make the leap from casual listener to writer?

SCOTT YANOW: I had a friend in college that put on a magazine called Record Review, that was going to feature rock, jazz, and classical music. The magazine did finally come out in 1976 and it lasted for eight years. During that period of time, I was the jazz editor, mostly because I worked very cheap, but also because I was fanatical about it and wanted to learn about everybody. I basically started at the top and I haven't really been a jazz editor of a magazine since. About a year or so before it died, I could tell it wouldn't be around forever and I sent out tearsheets to a lot of other magazines and began writing for them and I have been a freelancer ever since.


FJ: How many magazines are you currently writing for?

SCOTT YANOW: There have been times when it was up to nine or ten and then some magazines would die. Cadence, out of New York, that is one of my favorites. The LA Jazz Scene, locally and a magazine that is quite good called the Mississippi Rag, that once in a while I will do reviews for. Two Canadian magazines, one is called Planet Jazz and it is a quarterly and the other one is called the Jazz Report. I have been doing less in the past year because I have been wrting these books.


FJ: Let's touch on these book, first and foremost, I have to appauld you for turning around the All Music Guide. The first edition was a mess. You came on and revamped the second and third editions.

SCOTT YANOW: It was just odd how I found out about the All Music Guide. I was at Leonard Feather's place and I had only been there about three times. I was doing a little bit of geographical stuff in the early Nineties and I noticed on his bookshelf that he had the first edition of the All Music Guide. This was before the All Music Guide to Jazz came out. This was a large book with all kinds of music in it. I looked through it and I saw that they had a pretty large jazz section, but they had some major gaps and being an opportunist, I immediately wrote them a letter to see if they would want me to do some stuff for them. I got into the first edition of the All Music Guide, just doing four or five people they asked me to do. When the editor left, I immediately volunteered to rewrite the whole book. I could see that there were so many things that were wrong. Even with the corrections that were made, there were still quite a few in the second edition, but it was better and the third edition was the best of the three. I made it into a full time job really. I just consider the first one to be a bad first draft. Even with the third edition, I really didn't have complete control over it and so there are some more mistakes in there than I wanted there to be, but generally not the ones under my name, hopefully.


FJ: It is quite thorough in its presentation of vocalists as well as local musicians.

SCOTT YANOW: Well, thanks, Fred. It is because it is fun to do and I got tired of Los Angeles and West Coast artists being neglected by all these reference books written by East Coast people. It is about time. Los Angeles has long had a good local scene. There are major players coming from here, but they tend to get underrated because they are not in New York, like Horace Tapscott or Vinny Golia. There are dozens of others and so it is about time.


FJ: Let's touch on the swing book.

SCOTT YANOW: The swing book is doen and that is coming April 14. This whole thing is part of a series. Each one of these books are books on a different style. They are essays and biographies and CD and LP reviews. In some ways it is similar to the All Music Guide, but in other ways, it isn't. In this case, I wrote the whole thing so all the mistakes are mine. It is slated toward a certain style. In some places, where a person may have played in three or four styles through their career, we are only going to focus on that particular part of their career. It can be a little bit confusing, but in the case of swing, rather than have just the vintage swing bands and the sidemen from there, I wanted to also feature swing since that period, so the mainstream swing artists that came up since 1945, like Scott Hamilton and other people from the mainstream scene. I also felt that it was about time that someone looked really close at retro-swing. The dozens of bands that have been around now and around the last few years that are helping swing itself become more popular again. There is about forty or fifty of them covered and this kind of music has either been completely written off by the jazz world as a joke or some people listen to that and just praise everybody. I wanted to go through it and just answer whether or not the records were any good and whose records are the best and how does it match up to jazz history. It was background music for dances, which is one reason for its popularity. I always thought it was a major mistake for the jazz world to get rid of dance floors. I thought bebop bands could have played dances and hard bop groups and if they had, they would have had triple the audience.


FJ: Case and point, now, look at Medeski Martin and Wood.

SCOTT YANOW: Yeah, and you have to ask what are the most popular styles of jazz that are around today and in most cases they are the ones that you can dance to, whetherit is Latin jazz or crossover and even Dixieland. A lot of people are there because they have an opportunity to dance. I think if I were rich and had money to lease a jazz club, I would have a dance floor. But without changing the music. That is the key. That is where acid jazz was a mistake because they simplified the music and had all of these repetitive rhythms, but I was at least in favor of the basic concept. There is no reason why Horace Silver can't play for dances.


FJ: And the bebop book.

SCOTT YANOW: The bebop book isn't done yet, but hopefully it will be this week. I still have ten more people to write about. Bebop is the foundation of most styles of jazz that have come up in the last fifty years. In the case of this book, I wanted to isolate classic bebop from hard bop and West Coast jazz, because those will be in separate books. This is mostly on the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and the people who have come up since then like Phil Woods, Jon Faddis, Richie Cole, and Barry Harris. So in some cases it only focuses on certain periods in their career, Phil Woods before 1965 and Sonny Rollins before 1960. The format is basically similar, a lot of CD reviews because some of these people have recorded so much. The reviews are fairly short, but along with the ratings, it should give a good perspective on what to buy.


FJ: How many CDs do you get a month?

SCOTT YANOW: I can tell you by the week. I'd say 45. I keep almost all of them. I hopefully listen to it eventually. It gets to be piles and piles. I am not complaining though. It is a fun life to be a jazz writer. It is completely illogical. Musicians can't make a living, why should someone make a living writing about it. I also do a lot of liner notes too. I have done 197.


FJ: Two hundred and we should get you a watch.

Fred Jung is Editor-In-Chief and chief of his very own tribe. Comments? Email him.