In 1960, Amiri Baraka (then still known as LeRoi Jones) wrote an essay called “Jazz And The White Critic.” His argument was that critics of the time were fundamentally misunderstanding jazz because they were attempting to interpret it as music alone, instead of thinking about it first and foremost as the artistic expression of Black people in America. He wrote, “We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people, the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it.”

This is an intellectual and emotional leap that a lot of critics, in every artistic realm, often fail to make. They write about a piece of art by filtering it through what they believe are universal standards, without thinking very deeply at all about what in the artist’s background might have inspired those creative choices. I’m not talking about the “Which ex-boyfriend is this Taylor Swift song about?” line of inquiry that’s actually all too common in pop criticism. I’m talking about trying to walk in the artist’s shoes, and ask yourself why they might have made particular instrumental or arranging choices for a piece of music. Or to look in the mirror, metaphorically speaking, and really think about why you react to a certain musical choice yourself. Are there certain sounds, certain instruments or rhythms, that repel you instantly (for me, it’s the soprano saxophone), while others draw you in? Why? How did you develop your taste — from family, friends, music you grew up hearing, music that made a big impression on you as a teenager, music you adopted in college? And what does that say about you and how you listen/what you listen for now, as an adult? How do you define “good music” and “bad music”? Why do you think a musician would make music you think is bad? Do you automatically assume they just did it for the money, or are you willing to concede that maybe they think that music is good? And if so, are you willing to relisten and reconsider the idea that maybe they’re right and you’re wrong? Or that there’s no good or bad, only artistic choices?

Baraka continues, “Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans, but middlebrows as well. The irony here is that because the majority of jazz critics are white middlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middlebrow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards; in fact, quite often is in direct reaction against them. (As an analogy, suppose the great majority of the critics of Western formal music were poor, “uneducated” Negroes?)” This is a condition that maintains today. All the editors of major jazz magazines are white. I am white. I have been listening to jazz for over 30 years, and am friendly with many musicians, but they have life experiences which fuel their art that are totally foreign to me, just as the experiences which feed into the things I value in art and life might be totally foreign to them.

For this reason, I’m finding it more and more important not just to read Black writers on jazz, but also to read artist-to-artist conversations. At the moment, I’m reading Baraka’s Blues People (again, published as LeRoi Jones) and A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives In The Bebop Business. (Baraka and Spellman first met as students at Howard University, and remained friends.) The latter contains what may be the single most important and perceptive piece of writing on Cecil Taylor, and it was written in 1966! But two other books may be more important to jazz history than either of those: Arthur Taylor’s Notes And Tones, and Jeremy Pelt’s Griot.

Notes And Tones is a collection of interviews conducted by Taylor, a well-known jazz drummer, with his peers, including Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, and two dozen others. He self-published it in 1977, and it created an immediate sensation, so Da Capo Press picked it up in 1982. It’s a fascinating and eye-opening book, because all the musicians Taylor interviewed were Black, like himself, and he discussed the music with them from a musician’s perspective, and also discussed the role of Black musicians in white society, in stark and uncompromising terms.

Griot is also self-published, and it’s very much intended as a sequel to Notes And Tones. Pelt, a trumpeter I’ve featured in this column before and interviewed several times over the last decade, conducted fifteen interviews with Wynton Marsalis, Robert Glasper, JD Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, and others. They’re significantly longer than the interviews in Notes And Tones, and go into serious depth about the musicians’ lives and work — not breaking down specific performances or recordings in the way a critic might, but discussing how one’s style develops, and how one decides what to express. Pelt is particularly interested in what his subjects think about the condition of being a Black jazz musician in America, and the answers they give are thoughtful and thought-provoking. As a fan and a critic, this is one of the most important books about jazz I’ve ever read. I knew I had to ask him about it, so I called him up.

“I had been completely entranced by Notes And Tones as soon as I read it, which would have been in college,” he said. “And it was also a book that I’d come back to every once in a while, because it meant something different every couple of years.” The idea lingered in the back of his mind that somebody should do something similar for his generation of players, “and eventually it went from ‘somebody should’ to ‘I should.’” He began conducting interviews in 2018, trying whenever possible to do them at the musicians’ homes or neutral zones like restaurants, rather than backstage at a gig or in a hotel room, in order to keep the mood both friendly and personal, rather than professional, and that sense of peer-to-peer dialogue comes through on every page.

Pelt’s original intention to document his own generation of players went by the wayside pretty quickly; he’s 45, but the first two people interviewed for the book were drummer Warren Smith and bassist Paul West, both of whom were born in 1934. “My concern when I first started came from … the disconnect that I felt between the youth that are coming up playing this music and the older generation, in particular the Black youth and the Black older generation, and the other thing was, I wanted to do whatever I could to shed some type of light on an army of older generation musicians that nobody really talks about, that didn’t get their ink.” West, for example, is not a bassist with the profile of Ron Carter or Jimmy Garrison, but he worked with Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Randy Weston, Erroll Garner, and singers like Dinah Washington and Carmen McRae, as well as Petula Clark and Charles Aznavour. His conversation with Pelt provides some fascinating insights into life on the road and how musicians bounced from gig to gig, band to band, in the 1950s and 1960s.

The book also includes a long — nearly 30 pages! — interview with Wynton Marsalis, in which you get to see a side of him that he almost never presents on his own. Pelt draws out the street kid from New Orleans, rather than the jazz ambassador from Lincoln Center, and Marsalis talks freely about his own limitations, both musical and philosophical. It’s a truly fascinating conversation. “There were things that he was saying, especially towards the end, that were surprising, that reinforced that people — everybody’s human, and goes through a natural state of maturation where what they might have thought about 20, 30 years ago might have changed a bit, or drastically. So there were certain assumptions [when] I went in to interview Wynton that were just completely turned around. So it was a fun interview to have, just to learn more about how he’s thinking and what led him to where he’s at right now, mentality-wise.”

This is the first in a planned series of volumes; the book contains 15 interviews, but he had 35 complete when he decided to self-publish the book in December, and he’s now got over 50 in the can. You’ll need to buy it directly from him, but it’s definitely worth it.

The book shares its title with Pelt’s new album, Griot: This Is Important!, recorded with pianist Victor Gould, vibraphonist Chien Chien Lu, bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Allan Mednard, and percussionist Ismael Wignall, all of whom appeared on his 2019 album Jeremy Pelt The Artist. Harpist Brandee Younger also plays on one track. Excerpts from his interviews with Paul West, saxophonist JD Allen, pianists Larry Willis, Bertha Hope, and Harold Mabern (Willis and Mabern both died in 2019), vocalist René Marie, and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire are interspersed between the musical performances, and there’s a direct compositional and thematic relationship between the two. Pelt told me, “By the time the middle of 2019 came about, I was like, you know what, I’m gonna pick some of these sound bites and write music to [them].”

Pelt, who went to school for film scoring, has always written in a lush and lyrical manner, so it was easy for him to allow his interview subjects’ words to paint a picture and tell a story. As a result, Griot is not only one more in a long string of extremely beautiful, artful post-bop records, but a full-throated declaration of jazz as Black art within a long tradition of same.

We spoke not long after the death of drummer Ralph Peterson, whose whole life was about preserving the jazz tradition. He was recruited into Art Blakey’s big band as the second drummer, toward the end of the older man’s life, and was a thunderous, hard-hitting player himself, very much in the Blakey tradition, even recording albums with other Jazz Messengers alumni years later. He also spent much of his career doing something similar to what Blakey had done with the Messengers, forming bands stocked with younger players in order to teach them how the music and the business worked. One such group featured Pelt, saxophonist Jimmy Greene, pianist Orrin Evans, and bassist Eric Revis; they made three albums — The Art Of War, Subliminal Seduction, and Tests Of Time — between 2001 and 2003.

“Ralph was a tireless hustler, a tireless worker,” Pelt recalled. “He was in search of something that was going to get him to a point where he felt he should be in the jazz canon. One of the things that I learned from Ralph was, even if a lot of people would disagree with how you see yourself, it didn’t matter, because you have to have the vision for where you see yourself, and other people can choose to fuck with that or not. But you have to have the vision to see yourself where you think you should be. He always saw himself as being at the forefront of the music, and he led with that.” The present-day jazz industry isn’t all that interested in recognizing drummers as leaders. (Tyshawn Sorey is the obvious exception, but he’s often seen as a composer who plays the drums, which is different.) This is something against which Peterson struggled throughout his lifetime, and Pelt finds it baffling. “Drummers are always natural leaders.”

Investigate the Ralph Peterson discography. It encompasses trios, the adventurous music of the clarinet/vibes/bass/drums Fo’tet, big band projects, and more, and though he was the hardest-hitting drummer since Jeff “Tain” Watts, and only Johnathan Blake approaches his avalanche-like force now, he was also a sophisticated and subtle composer and player, who showcased everyone in his bands at their best.

The Grammy Awards were given out this past Sunday; in case you weren’t paying attention, here are the winners in the jazz and jazz-adjacent categories:

Best Jazz Instrumental Album: Chick Corea, Christian McBride & Brian Blade, Trilogy 2
Best Jazz Vocal Album: Kurt Elling feat. Danilo Pérez, Secrets Are The Best Stories
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album: Maria Schneider Orchestra, Data Lords
Best Latin Jazz Album: Arturo O’Farrill & The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, Four Questions
Best Improvised Jazz Solo: Chick Corea, “All Blues”
Best Instrumental Composition: Maria Schneider, “Sputnik”
Best Contemporary Instrumental Album: Snarky Puppy, Live At The Royal Albert Hall

And now, new music!