Gerald Early on Jazz

Gerald Early's essay "Passing of Jazz's Old Guard," published in a 1985 issue of Kenyon Review, is an excellent education in jazz. Ostensibly, it is a profile of and elegy to those artists who have brought the artform to public consciousness. Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Stitt get namechecked in the subtitle. But most important of all is the education the essay gives you.

A jazz enthusiast himself, Early wants you to check out these artists. There's Mingus, Monk, and Stitt, but have you have heard Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Wilbur Ware? Read the essay, and you'll learn of them, too, and many others. Of course, Mingus, Monk, and Stitt are held up by Early, because Early regards these figures as paragons of the form. And for his purposes, a study of their lives shows the difficulties of the prototypical jazz musician.

Early is particularly interested in these artists' short, perilous lives. He notes first of all that the greatest obstacle these artists had to deal with was the color of their skin. The black population in the United States is 41 million in a country of 340 million. Meanwhile, 37% of the incarcerated population is black. No surprise, Early says, that these artists suffered from racial targeting from birth to death.

Not only that. There are also the perils of being an artist, period. Artists have a penchant to live fast and die young. Mingus passed at 56, Stitt at 58, Monk at 64. They all passed at a time when the median age of death in the United States was 70. Life is never easy on artists, even and especially great artists.

The value of reading Early's essay, should you be so inclined, is the jazz education. You can follow up on artists and their major works. I for one, to name one example, look forward to listening to Booker Ervin's Freedom Book from 1963. No doubt I'll be enlightened.