Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism.

My all-time favorite Dumb Review Sentence is from the late fifties' Chicago Sun-Times, on Leonard Feather's important book, Inside Jazz. The reviewer, enthusiastic to the point of illogic, blurted, "If there were no other book on jazz, this would be the one to have."

Right.

I mention that because my enthusiasm for Robert Gottlieb's Reading Jazz is, if anything, fiercer than that of the hapless Sun-Times reviewer: so, writing this, I am fighting heroically the urge to burble similarly.

Reading Jazz is simply - no, complicatedly - wonderful. There has been so much good writing about jazz, by the players and the critics alike: probably because jazz, of all music, is a music that, if you love it, you love it beyond measure. Known, respected, and played around the planet by now, it paradoxically retains the cachet of an insider's thing, a wry secret shared between the players and the crowd. A rock or pop concert is a licensed revel - and there's nothing wrong with that; a classical concert is a secular liturgy - the essential flip side of carnival. There is no such thing, really, as a "jazz concert." In a fifteen-table bar - the ideal venue or in the Hollywood Bowl, a jazz performance, if it is a jazz performance, is less performance than intimate conversation: a seminar for thousands. In this, as in so much else, the music is the defining American art, melding - as we keep hoping America itself will - absolute democracy and absolute, ferocious individuality.

Gottlieb's book catches or incarnates that peculiar, unnamable aura. No important writer on the music is unrepresented here, regardless of their often violent disagreements with one another. Jazz lovers are famously partisan. It would be silly to list them all - though I can't help tipping the hat to the brilliant Stanley Crouch, Gary Giddins, and Dan Morgenstern. It's enough to say that this is not only the best book about jazz I've seen, but the first really satisfactory anthology of jazz criticism, as essential and invigorating as the Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, but with the difference that this book was put together by just one guy.

It's much more than that, though. Gottlieb divides his collection into three equal sections, as his subtitle indicates. The "Autobiography" section is thirty-three reminiscences by some of the crucial figures in the saga: Louis Armstrong being his wonderful self, Duke Ellington being - how could he not? - florid and elegant, Miles Davis being a mean-spirited monster of ego, Art Pepper being chillingly frank about the ravages of heroin on his life and his music. And more. What emerges from this cacophony, as in New Orleans ensemble playing, is an ultimate harmony: all these great players lived in the music. From the valiant to the vile, they did burn with a fierce, sometimes steely passion. When Ellington titled his autobiography Music Is My Mistress, he was being characteristically flamboyant: but he was not at all joking.

The second section, "Reportage," is a compilation of sketches, profiles, and reminiscences about the music and the musicians, from the legendary King Oliver (Armstrong's patron and chief influence) through the years of the Big Bands to the formation of "modern" jazz (bop) in the forties and beyond. Among the gems are Whitney Balliett's splendid portrait of the underappreciated Dixieland clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, Ralph Ellison's memories of Minton's Playhouse in New York, the club where bop was born, and Gene Lees's narrative of a recording session with the ebullient, force-of-nature Dizzy Gillespie. Gems, as I say, but in a tiara. (Only Jean-Paul Sartre, writing on the essence of jazz, seems to be a little behind the beat: but that itself, to us gallophobes, is oddly satisfactory.)

The third part of the book is "Criticism," and here Gottlieb's plan begins to reveal a central, though not a crucial, flaw. Just what is the difference among autobiography, reportage, and criticism - when the subject is jazz?

Is there an art where personality, life-story, and craft are so intimately intermixed as in this one? I think not except, perhaps, in literature. I've learned, painfully over many years, that good writing is about 90 percent voice and 10 percent debris: find your voice and you're in like a burglar. But jazz - forget the harmonic analyses and the learned comparisons to Baroque counterpoint and modal composition - is voice, and voice, and voice alone. Anyone truly entranced by the music - trust me, it's the only way to listen - hears voices: the voices of the masters, Louis, Dizzy, Bird, Tatum, Zoot Sims, Mulligan; and, in second-line players, combinations of those voices.

Rock groups are named as concepts-as marketing labels. Symphonic ensembles are named for the cities that sponsor and maintain them: the Philadelphia, the Boston, the - under Georg Solti - all-but-unapproachable Chicago.

And how are jazz groups named? "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five"; "The Benny Goodman Quartet"; "The Miles Davis Quintet"; or, now, "The Harry Connick Big Band." Proper names. Here is a music in which, at its best, individuality and popularity are indistinguishable, in which the pure job of the moment (jazz would not be jazz without recorded sound) is everything, and in which the single self both merges with and rises above the ensemble in which it plays. Emerson would have gone bonkers about this as the truly American art. Whitman, too.

So jazz autobiography, reportage, and criticism are basically - apologies to Gottlieb - the same thing: talk about something we love. And it's the passion - the passion of an? for the music - that matters. No other book on jazz catches that magnificent obsession the way Reading Jazz does.

The very first jazz recording, "Livery Stable Blues," by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was released in 1917 - eighty years ago this year.

Not to know the music is not to be, in the fullest sense, American. For those who don't know it, this book is an indispensable guide. And for those who do - well, for those who do, it's simply a delight.

Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara.