Scott Yanow reviewed Dan Ouellette’s latest book, The Landfill Chronicles: Unearthing Legends of Modern Music, for his column in The L.A. Jazz Scene.
Dan Ouellette has long been a top-notch jazz journalist. Perhaps best known for his association with Downbeat (where he has written articles and conducted Blindfold Tests in front of festival audiences), he has written for many magazines through the years. Because quite a few of those publications are no longer around and the articles have not been digitized, he refers to those writings as the “Landfill Chronicles,” meaning that the magazines that printed his pieces are now mostly found on landfills.
His book, which is subtitled “Unearthing Legends Of Modern Music,” has 27 chapters, each one focusing on an artist or, with the exception of Saxophone Summit, a group. He has mostly restored his articles to their full-length (before editors cut them back to fill limited magazine space) and some chapters include a few complementary pieces on the same artist. Dating from 1988 to the near-present, a few of the articles are a little dated when they sometimes focus around the release of an album, but all serve as valuable time capsules.
Ouellette is an excellent interviewer who often befriends his subjects which allows the artists to feel comfortable and freely discuss many topics. His musical tastes are wide so some of these musicians are outside of jazz, but each one has interesting tales to tell. The jazz greats profiled are John Abercrombie, Carla Bley, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter (talking about her adventures with Paganini’s violin), Ornette Coleman (a review rather than an interview), Charlie Haden, Freddie Hubbard (a Blindfold test), Bobby Hutcherson, Abdullah Ibrahim, Keith Jarrett, Elvin Jones, Wynton Marsalis, Jason Moran, Saxophone Summit, Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Smith, Esperanza Spalding, Henry Threadgill, and McCoy Tyner. In the “beyond” category are Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Elvis Costello, John Lee Hooker, Joni Mitchell, Astor Piazzolla, Lou Reed, and Frank Zappa (his final interview which is quite intriguing).
Books such as The Landfill Chronicles (available from cymbalpress.com) are very valuable because they capture artists talking frankly about their lives at a particular point in their careers. Easy to read and filled with fresh stories, this is a book well worth acquiring.
