Langston Hughes, Albert Murray, A.B. Spellman, and Stanley Crouch; musicians Gunther Schuller, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Lucky Thompson, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Bill Evans; jazz historians Martin Williams, Dan Morganstern, Leonard Feather, Barry Ulanov, Whitney Balliet, and Phil Shaap; and record producers George Avakian, Don Schlitten, David Himmelstein, Norman Granz, and Orrin Keepnews. As Tom Piazza's excellent SETTING THE TEMPO: FIFTY YEARS OF GREAT JAZZ LINER NOTES makes evident, these essays on the backs of records comprise "a minor literary genre," often providing background on the musicians and the recordings, historical contexts, musical analysis, a window into the recording process, intimate anecdotes and personal views of the musicians that have an immediacy and warmth rarely found in other jazz writing--setting the tempo, in a sense, for the listener's appreciation of the music.(9) What makes the liner notes unique as a form is that, unlike reviews or even a jazz concert's program notes, one reads them at the same time that one experiences the art: they offer criticism in the rudimentary sense of MAKING THE ART AVAILABLE, of enlarging its meaning in the moment of direct experience. Liner notes differ from recorded guides to museum art exhibits (a fascinating analogy) in that they typically make little effort to be objective or unobtrusively pedagogical; the best writers of liner notes, like the best sports writers, are passionately opinionated stylists. There is always that moment, which any jazz fan recognizes, of unwrapping the record, putting it on, and settling in to read the notes, to get the word on the music from the expert. Good liner notes stick in the listener's mind and attach themselves the experience of listening to the record; the best, in fact, like David Himmelstein's notes to Booker Ervin's "Setting the Pace" or Amiri Baraka's to "Coltrane's Live at Birdland," have themselves become class...
