Francis Davis' Latest Collection, Like Young: Jazz and Pop, Youth and Middle Age

Francis Davis is a fan of Ornette Coleman: "Ornette's has been the music to which my heart beats most naturally since I started listening to jazz some thirty years ago," he writes in one piece in Like Young: Jazz and Pop, Youth and Middle Age (Da Capo Press, 368 pages, $26), his fourth collection of writings on music. But Davis also describes himself responding to a question from Gary Giddins about why Ornette's music isn't as shocking as it was 40 years ago: "The only conclusion I reached was that the music of a man in his sixties is inevitably going to sound less intense than the music he made when he was in his late twenties."

I happen to think that conclusion isn't really worthy of Davis, who's one of the most intelligent and thoughtful music writers around. A contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly, where earlier versions of several of these pieces appeared, Davis has eclectic tastes (here he weighs in on subjects ranging from Sinatra to the Velvet Underground to Rashsaan Roland Kirk to Rent) and a talent for leavening his nuanced explications with amusingly bitchy bon mots. "Mick Jagger...should think twice these days before singing 'Sympathy for the Devil': Younger fans might take him literally when he boasts of having been on hand for the Crucifixion." Another example, about white kids who adopt black fashions, from a piece about his annual vacation in Santa Cruz: "Making a pitiful attempt to emulate the black rappers they see in videos, some of these kids...[put] me in mind of Negro lawn jockeys whose faces have been painted white in a misguided show of racial enlightenment."

Davis, who's also written a history of the blues, has never been afraid of offending or going against the grain: he was one of the first mainstream jazz writers to challenge Wynton Marsalis' views on jazz and indeed black history more generally. In articles here on Billie Holiday and Bud Powell he questions our popular and intellectual culture's glamorization of some black artists' misery and/or self-destructiveness, reminding us that "not everyone who suffers becomes a great artist," telling us that Powell was considered "a little on the border line" by fellow musicians before he was institutionalized, saying of Holiday that "in fighting to become her own woman she also became her own victim?nobody else's." Like Young's highlights include its terrific opening piece on Sinatra, a perceptive short article on Brian Wilson (cleverly titled "Beached"), an historic overview of New York's late 70s "loft jazz" scene and a very funny story about Davis' taking White Light/White Heat to a hash party the day that record came out.

So I'm a fan of Francis Davis, and I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes any of the artists or bands mentioned above, or to anyone interested in music journalism or criticism. As is probably unavoidable in a collection (it's worth noting that nothing here appears exactly as it did when originally published), Like Young is uneven. Some pieces proceed a little leisurely for my taste, while others, including ones on musicians I've never counted among my favorites (McCoy Tyner, for example), are captivating from start to finish.

But then there's that subtitle, that theme. Ideas about youth and aging, about changing musical tastes and various musicians' evolution (or devolution, or stubborn refusal to change), do run through many of the articles collected in Like Young. Still, the notion that that theme actually unites all these disparate pieces is a bit of a reach. Davis' strengths are the esthetic and the personal, and sometimes when he goes for the broader cultural and political context, he misses, as I think he does in the piece on Dylan here, titled "The Best Years of Our Lives." He's still capable, though, of tossing off little remarks that resonate because, and I mean this in the best way, they're obvious truths. Like when he says of jazz's decline in popularity that "what's missing is the illusion jazz once offered of providing young whites with a way into black culture at its most esoteric and oppositional. Rap now fills that role..."

Like Young, then, is a kind of complement to John Strausbaugh's [Rock Til You Drop], which limned the political and cultural aspects of both the rise of rock and the subsequent Great Rock 'n' Roll Sellout that Davis here mostly just touches upon in passing, perhaps in part because his previous collection, Bebop and Nothingness (1996) treated "the commodification of youth" as it applied to the jazz world. The problem is that without social and political context, personal reflections and responses can be, in true boomer fashion, solipsistic. I suppose I could play the game, too, and tell you all about how my own appreciation of Dylan has changed since I first heard him, but when I first heard Dylan I was five years old. Or younger. Davis writes about a college classmate rushing into a lecture to debate the possibly mystical meanings of the trees on the cover of John Wesley Harding. He wants his readers to laugh (I did), but he also seems to want us to think that such behavior is unique to his generation, the generation that was in college at the time of the record's release, and it isn't?more recently a goodly number of people seem to have felt more or less the same way about, say, the Flaming Lips. (I didn't, but that's just me. Me, not my generation.) More to the point, a lot of people recently have felt the same way about Dylan. When I started college a bunch of us would recite Dylan lyrics at each other. Were we aping our pawrents without being aware of it, implicitly conceding our own cultural inferiority? I don't think so. I think we just liked Dylan, along with the Pixies and Public Enemy. I still like all three, though Davis would have it that I'll get tired of Dylan, at least, soon enough.

Davis is a boomer (born in 1946) and there's only so long you can listen to your dad, as it were, rattle on before you have to talk back. Take those "lawn jockeys," for example. Why is it okay for the teenage Elvis to buy his clothes on Beale St., the 125th St. of 1950s Memphis, but a teenage white Santa Cruz resident in the year 2000 can't get away with wearing baggy pants? Was it okay because he was Elvis? Because he did it before it was a trend?

Throughout Like Young Davis sometimes seems to want things both ways. He notes how his profession allows him to "go on indulging my undergraduate obsession with books and music," but in a piece written 10 years earlier admits to not listening to much new rock 'n' roll?some undergraduate. To return to Ornette, Davis speaks of the saxophonist's "great consistency as an improviser," and says of a 1997 reunion concert with Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden that "the magic was still there." So what does the consistency, well, consist of? What is the elusive "intensity" that Ornette had but no longer has? Writing about the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" Davis correctly pegs the song as being about fantasy and longing, not actual memory, pointing out that Brian Wilson didn't spend much time on the beach and was in fact so afraid of the ocean he never even tried to surf. He says the hints of melancholy in the song probably make it a favorite of divorced couples "wondering what went wrong." I'd add that Wilson recorded the song, which is written from the point of view of someone too young to get married, when he was 23. Could someone please explain again how and why age is supposed to be so important?

The problem with the commodification of youth is that officially sanctioned versions of what it's like to be young (carefree, energetic, not cynical)?whether in the 50s and 60s or the 80s and 90s?displace people's actual memories. Being young is a very mixed bag (try relatively powerless, clueless, frustrated and depressed?I'll grant the energetic) whereas looking back on one's youth from an older, idealizing vantage point is pretty much without a downside. It's disturbing to see someone as smart as Davis fall into this trap, when even his interview subjects paint a more complicated picture.

My favorite piece in Like Young is the closer: "The Moral of the Story from the Guy Who Knows" (that's a lyric from "Runaround Sue"). It's 12 years old and was originally commissioned by The New Yorker, but ended up in a Voice supplement, where, it's worth noting, it probably couldn't appear today. Unlike most of Like Young, this piece is reportage, a profile of Dion DiMucci, who as a solo artist and with the Belmonts had 20 Top 40 hits between 1958 and 1963. I don't want to give everything away?the piece is that good?but suffice it to say that Dion has a very unsentimental take on his own youth. As a junkie from his mid-teens on, who fought with his parents and everyone else while being paid $100,000 to sing music he didn't much care for, how could he not? The positioning and title of this last piece indicate that Davis knows it's a key to his theme. I only wish Like Young as a whole was as energetic and wise and full of life as this one of its parts.