Gordon's Village Vanguard
March 02, 2018, by Ali
We’ve entered the Jazz Age (or really the late Jazz Age) with this weekend’s readings, chapters twelve through seventeen of Max Gordon’s Live at the Village Vanguard. We pretty much just jumped right into the book, robbing us of some history on the Village Vanguard itself.
The club was opened by Max Gordon himself, something you might not have gotten if you hadn’t read the prologue. According to Wikipedia, he opened it in 1935 but the Vanguard didn’t go full jazz until 1957. The book is not quite a memoir but a retelling of Gordon’s memories of running the club over the past fifty years (and it still stands even today).
Gordon’s stories, while an interesting look at the NYC jazz scene and the people who made it happen during its heyday, are shallow and simple. He doesn’t really dive deep or below the surface of what was going on (or really provide context), he just kind of tells it as it was. He tells six entirely different stories yet in total they don’t even take up a full forty pages. For such a fascinating subject, it would’ve been nice if he had expanded and elaborated.
I once heard that the only two true American art forms are jazz and comic books (personally I would add television as the third but that’s another subject). But Gordon doesn’t really spend any time focusing on the musicality. His focus is mostly on the people of the jazz scene but he doesn’t spend much time on their achievements either. From someone who presumably saw first hand how Jazz music changed over a year, it is a shame he sets the musical aspect to the side, turning the book into one human interest story, when it could’ve been an analytical look at one of America’s only true art forms.
My criticisms aside, Gordon does make some interesting observations. One anecdote I found particularly interesting was when Gordon asked Miles Davis to play behind one of the girl singers at the club. Davis refused, saying “I don’t play behind no girl singer”. That girl singer, as Gordon puts it, went on to be the dog cloner herself Barbra Streisand. Gordon doesn’t really continue with the story from there, but I can’t help but be absolutely fascinated by this little tidbit. I mean Davis and Streisand are both legends in every sense of the word and the idea of them crossing (tension-filled) paths in a small Greenwich Village nightclub is absolutely insane to me.
One other observation I enjoyed was the story about LSD and the Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard. A big fan of The Beatles and a watcher of Mad Men, I knew about how people thought LSD was basically a health thing designed to “open your mind” but reading about it first-hand was a different (yet still ridiculous) experience. I mean sure you can do a lot worse than LSD (cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, etc.) but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. It’s funny that people actually thought this way and experimenting with it was just a part of science in the 60’s.
So while I didn’t find this book to be particularly revealing, it was still a fun read. I just wish there was more.