A Review of Playing Changes by Nate Chinen
A book review for the new year — Playing Changes by Nate Chinen
So my daughter Lily works at a local bookstore and she’s quite an astute selector of books for other people. She got me a copy of Playing Changes by the music writer and broadcaster Nate Chinen, which proved to be an outstanding selection indeed. I really enjoyed this, the first book I’ve finished in 2023. Published in 2018, Playing Changes consists of a set of chapters that stand alone well as critical essays and portraits of contemporary jazz artists. But they also cohere, in this volume, to deliver on the promise that lies in the book’s subtitle, an exploration of “Jazz in the New Century.”
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get the lay of the land in the national jazz scene from about 2000 to 2018 (and a little before, with significant context for the whole “Young Lions” jazz movement in the 1980’s and forward). For those who are plugged in right now, there are some voices and twists missing *since* 2018, which may sound a little unfair except that one quickly becomes accustomed to having such an adept guide to all things happening that it seems just a bit odd when there is a name you know that might be missing! But fear not, because like many culture writers, Chinen has a Substack titled “The Gig” that you can subscribe to in order to stay hip.
The chapters in Playing Changes have a formula, not unlike a jazz progression or song form if we want to go there, that repeats and offers a satisfying experience with twists and variations as the book moves forward in time, roughly speaking, from the early 2000’s to the second decade of this century. The formula is to pair vivid profiles of current artists, often drawing from primary source interviews conducted by the author and incorporating a fluid and seamless synthesis of secondary material, with a topical thread that characterizes the state of the idiom of Black American music known as jazz. The latter is my own (awkward) formulation meant to convey the complexity of a still-fluid, still controversial, art whose very boundaries and name(s) are still very much under negotiation by the artists who make this music.
I am impressed by Chianen’s lyrical and well-paced prose in the more critical passages — as when he is giving his well-informed impressions of songs — as well as his ability to establish a kind of respectful but direct reportage rather than sinking into harangue when it comes to noting where there may be contentions, controversy, and conventions in play. It’s an acknowledged problem that jazz journalism, itself, can amplify “controversies” in ways that build tension among key players who, among themselves, may have no animosity. Taken too far it can lead to what Race and Jazz Studies scholar Herman Grey has called the rendering of alternate personas, as in the creation of the mythical “Trane” quite apart from the studious, withdrawn John Coltrane.
But Chianen does a masterful job of not amplifying differences such that they become clickbait-y beefs among big names. Nor does he shy away, however, from rendering the deliberate moves that artists make to distinguish themselves and what they are doing from a tradition they find too reductive. He strikes this balance from the beginning of the book in an introductory chapter that features Kamasi Washington alongside Wynton Marsalis. The thematic juxtaposition in the chapter is someone working on the boundary of jazz who elects to identify as a jazz musician even if his music is not trending toward the more institutional project that Marsalis and organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center would perhaps seek to recognize.
I found myself moving quickly through each chapter and learning a great deal about figures whose personal histories I had not known — Brad Meldau, Esperanza Spalding, and many others. I was also able to trace some familiar storylines in the recent history of jazz that have sparked my interest (and my reading). These include the institutionalization impulse of Marsalis and others, the critique of white dominated accounts of jazz music by Nicholas Payton, and the relatively recent emergence of jazz education in conservatories and jazz studies in the Humanities. But there is much here of substance, even at a brisk tempo, and particularly if your jazz tastes run toward the avant garde as Chinen’s taste seem to or, at least in this book, as he seems to want to feature as a modest attempt at counterhegemony in the face of the JLC (jazz.org) narrative in the popular press.
The title of the book says as much, no? “Playing Changes” is a pun, after all, but a clever one and also a giveaway that the author is interested not so much in those whose take is that jazz is a language to be learned and mastered with a rich tradition as “America’s Classical Music” but rather that jazz is an art form still forming, morphing, and evolving in the present moment. Fair enough. The book doesn’t beat the reader over the head with this view, but rather shows us where there are interesting places to look and listen.
Each chapter has about five albums that are recommended as a pairing — too much music to last for just one chapter, I found! — and there’s also a list in the appendix of 129 essential albums of the new millennium so far…with the admirable constraint applied that each artist appears as a leader only once. Sorted by year, it could easily make for a really nice year’s worth of intentional listening to go through the full list and you’d still have 6 years or so of music to catch up on since the publication of the book when you were finished!
I really enjoyed reading this book. I learned something from every chapter. And while I think being a bit more engaged in both jazz criticism and cultural history is probably something that enhanced my reading experience — I knew the characters in this book and some of their exploits, etc. — I don’t think that is required for other readers to enjoy it.
My own takeaway from coming back to playing and learning about jazz music as an adult is that it feels mandatory for me, personally, and I would say highly recommended for others as a way to understand the time we live in to understand this music, where it came from, and how it is present in the culture today. This book is a remarkably valuable resource for bringing someone up to speed in a hurry about where jazz music is right now and who its key figures are. If you are a fan or you just want to know more, pick it up!
