Richard M. Sudhalter told Jeff Sultanof that he should write books. Five pages into Sultanof’s multi-faceted examination of big band jazz, I felt the same way.
Experiencing Big Band Jazz is a brand-new and admirable book by a composer, arranger, historian, archivist of all kinds of American music, vernacular and formally composed. I’ve never met Jeff, but I have had several years to admire his expertise: I’ve read his postings to an online jazz research group with pleasure. Sultanof isn’t interested in self-absorbed preening or proving ideological points for ideology’s sake; he’s interested in tangible evidence and following its implications. And when he doesn’t know, he says so, which is honest and rare. This diligence and rigor is at the heart of the book.
Incidentally, a low bow to whomever conceived the cover—a loose Ellington assemblage that, unlike the expected choice, fellows in dinner jackets or tuxedos behind floor music stands, did not say nostalgia and thus distance prospective readers. And the old-timers in the imagined bookstore (people of my ilk and generation) warm to pictures of Ray Nance, Sonny Greer, Rex Stewart.
Now, if this book had been proposed in the Sixties, no publisher would have taken it—no reflection on the author—because big band jazz was a charmingly ubiquitous part of everyone’s culture and needed little explication. Fifty
