Jim Giuffre Musician by Nat Hentoff - Jim Giuffre Composer - As Told to Downbeat [John Tynan]

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following article is from the research for my forthcoming Jazz West Coast Reader.

In the early 1950s, along with Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne, multi-reed player, composer-arranger Jimmy Giuffre [1921-2008] would help provide a cornerstone for the stylistic structure of “West Coast Jazz.”

Sometimes referred to as “The Quiet Man” for his introspective and self-effacing manner, I can think of no other musician based on the West Coast during the period in question who gave so much thought to the music he was creating.

As Francis Davis comments, Jimmy also was his own critic:

“Given a long history of animosity between musicians and those who write about music (or merely write about it, as some musicians would say), I hope that Jimmy Giuffre won’t take my suggestion that he would have made an excellent jazz critic the wrong way.

I simply mean that during his most prolific period as a recording artist, beginning with the release of his first 10” LP for Capitol in 1954, Giuffre in interviews and liner notes provided his listeners with a running commentary on his motives and methods, revealing in the process a great deal of knowledge of such other disciplines as philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Reading Giuffre on Giuffre, a critic might despair, because this is one of the rare instances in which a performer has already been as fair and impartial a judge of his own successes and failures as anyone could hope to be.

(Especially for an artist as committed to public trial and error as Giuffre was during the period in which he recorded most frequently. There is also a sense in which a new piece of music can be heard as a critique of the work that came before it – yet another way in which Giuffre beat after-the-fact commentators like myself to the punch).

Best of all, despite seeming to rebuke the jazz rank-in-file of the 1950s for their conformist tendencies, Giuffre never lapsed into what I call the existential fallacy, that leap of hubris by which an artist (or for that matter, any individual) presumes that his new direction is one that everybody should follow.

In one of his earliest pronouncement – a Down Beat [November 30, 1955] article published under his byline in 1955, in which he explained his decision to limit the bass and drums on his controversial new album Tangents in Jazz [Capitol T-634] – he was careful to point out in his lead that he wasn’t trying to “preach a sermon” in order to bring the rest of Jazz into line. “It’s just one way,” he reiterated at the end, “and every man must go his own way.”

• Francis Davis, [Jimmy Giuffre - The Complete Capitol and Atlantic Recordings Mosaic Records, MD6-176].