Gary Giddins caught the jazz bug the summer he was 15, when he and a dozen or so other teenagers from the northeast, riding the rails in a sort of alternative to camp, pulled into New Orleans. “It was 1963, the height of the civil rights thing,” the Long Island native recalls. “When we got to the motel the first thing we saw were three doors labeled ‘men,’ ‘women,’ and ‘colored men’–‘colored women’ must have been somewhere else. Later I was riding on a streetcar on Canal Street and an elderly black woman sat down next to me, and there were three or four white girls about my age who loudly berated me for letting her sit there. For me the place was an absolute nightmare.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But then he happened upon a small miracle: a performance by Emanuel Sayles’s Silverleaf Ragtimers. “I walked into the Orleans Hotel on a Sunday afternoon, and I opened up the doors of the ballroom,” he says. “The walls were covered with this red brothel-type wallpaper and all of these black and white people were talking, smoking cigarettes, and holding cocktail glasses. So right away, even before the music started, it seemed like a very enlightened world.”
Unlike most music writers, Giddins is a student of criticism. He attended Grinnell College in Iowa, earning a degree in English lit with the ambition of becoming a literary critic. He couldn’t find that kind of work when he graduated in 1970, so he began writing film criticism for the Hollywood Reporter and then freelance articles for the jazz magazine Down Beat. Within a year he’d decided to concentrate on jazz, and by 1974 he had a regular column in the Voice, “Weather Bird.” Today the Voice is his principal forum, but he’s also contributed to the New York Times, the Nation, and Vanity Fair, among others. Though the new book features some greatly expanded versions of pieces originally written for the Voice, Giddins estimates that 70 percent of the material is new.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Charles Eschelman.
