It wouldn’t be a fair fight. Put in the same ring, the 10,000-pound gorilla JAZZ: The Smithsonian Anthology (let’s call it JTSA) would pummel little Putumayo Presents Jazz (PPJ).
Each, briefly:
• JTSA: 6 CDs, 111 tracks spanning the years 1899–2003, 200-page booklet. Compiled by an executive committee of five jazz scholars including John Edward Hasse and Dan Morgenstern, aided by an advisory panel of 42. A “jazz appreciation course in a box.” SRP $107.98.
• PPJ: 1 CD, 12 tracks, most recorded in the 1950s, liner notes by WWOZ (New Orleans) DJ Joel Dinerstein. The press release cites label founder Dan Storper’s “increased exposure to jazz since moving to New Orleans.” Apparently Storper listens to Dinerstein’s show a lot. It reminded him of “how much I still loved the songs of my parents’ generation.” SRP $14.98.
Putumayo World Music has always seemed like a personal label to me, led by the interests of its founder. Since Storper’s relocation to NOLA in 2003, the label has produced several jazz collections including New Orleans, Jazz Around the World, Latin Jazz, Women of Jazz, and the most recent, Jazz, due out May 3.
New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff does not much like JTSA. In his review published March 17, he asks, “How could such a righteous cultural product, full of so many sublime parts, feel so cumulatively limp?” Then: “What’s missing is its desire to be any more than a list, rather than an argument or a thesis.” And: “The new Smithsonian anthology is fair minded, which is to say strangely anonymous. Though the essays are signed, one can’t be sure whether the signers chose the tracks, and you won’t find out how the anthologizers, individually or as a body, really feel about anything in particular.”
I’ll probably buy JTSA anyway, sooner or later, and stack it on top of my copy of The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1987 edition), about which Ratliff has far kinder things to say. JTSA seems like the sort of reference that belongs in a music library, the equivalent of a music dictionary or encyclopedia.
I doubt that Ratliff will review the Putumayo collection, which I’ve been listening to for the past few days and like very much. Although Putumayo World Music is a success in a time when labels are becoming anachronisms, it’s not taken seriously by most music critics.
