[78-L] Leonard Feather's Inside Jazz

[Geoffrey Wheeler]

Here’s a shortened version of what Gary Giddens has to say about 
Feather’s “Inside Bebop.”

In 1949, Feather published his first book, a shocking-pink $2 paperback 
with a tiny picture of his head ("the first critic to herald the new 
movement in jazz") under the title, Inside Be-Bop. It opened, 
hilariously, with six epigrams eviscerating bebop, including one from 
Hammond, who at the time found the whole subject of modern jazz 
anathema. Only 103 pages, it had an incalculable impact, making the 
case for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie biographically, 
historically, and musically: even by today's standards, the 
transcriptions are exemplary. ... And though later generations of 
critics rebuked it and him for missing the boat on Thelonious Monk (my 
theory is he felt he needed a fall-guy to underscore the evaluative 
weight of his endorsements), he captained the ferry that brought Parker 
and company to port. Inside Be-Bop is probably the most plagiarized 
book ever published about jazz, as Leonard was quick to note. I told 
him much of the stealing was inadvertent: The book's central ideas 
passed so quickly into the realm of received wisdom, they were iterated 
by writers with no idea of their provenance. ...”