From the Publisher - Praise for Blues Up and Down:

"Peppery, bristling, inspired... Piazza tosses off ear-and-brain openers at an exciting rate." --Ray Sawhill, Salon

"Tom Piazza's quest to understand the forces that lead to musical creativity has led him to write some of the most humanely rendered portraits in contemporary music criticism.... The strength of [Blues Up and Down] is in the new writings, which specifically delineate a case for open minds, ears and hearts... This is an important book, in large part because for Piazza everything is worth consideration. And what better way is there to move through life?" --David Greenberger, Pulse

"Uncommon breadth and musical sophistication... Piazza is one of the most literate writers covering jazz...[Blues Up and Down] offers a model of how to make music theory not only accessible but vital." --David Hajdu, Civilization

"Vibrantly written... an encouragement to listen, to think, and to keep faith." --Chris Waddington, New Orleans Times-Picayune

The publisher, St. Martin's Press, October 29, 1997

Jazz lives: An eye-opening take on 15 years of jazz debate: Tom Piazza's BLUES UP AND DOWN: JAZZ IN OUR TIME combines 15 years of groundbreaking reporting with provocative new essays that explore the place of jazz in our culture. Piazza's important jazz commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere; he has been an especially insightful interpreter of the acoustic-jazz revolution among young jazz musicians that has erupted since the early 1980s. Wynton Marsalis has been at the forefront of that movement, and has attracted huge controversy for his reawakening of interest in the jazz tradition (which others have seen as "neo-conservative", anti-progressive thinking). But Piazza's BLUES UP AND DOWN forces us to reconsider the terms of the debate (what do we mean by "progress?" "freedom"?) and points a critical finger at reviewers who treat jazz as a business of irrational emotional catharsis rather than as one of our greatest and most challenging art forms. Piazza's essays ultimately transcend the debate about jazz to raise larger questions: What do we expect from "our" artists? How do our own agendas affect how we hear music? And every reader who engages with his point of view (whether in agreement or not) will be challenged and rewarded.

From Kirkus Reviews , September 15, 1997

Piazza, whose short-story collection Blues and Trouble (1996) won the Michener Prize, looks again at his favorite music in this collection of occasional pieces. Writing on jazz between 1979 and 1997 (for which he won the 1996 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing), Piazza has had the opportunity to watch this musical phoenix arise once again resplendent from its supposed ashes. In the course of the two decades covered by the pieces in this volume (most of them previously published in the New York Times, the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and the Village Voice), Piazza has recounted the arrival of a new generation of young jazz musicians, headed by the controversial Wynton Marsalis. The author has been one of the more forceful advocates for Marsalis and his acolytes and their brand of neoclassical jazz. Briefly, Piazza believes that the critics who decry Marsalis's lack of "emotion'' are unwittingly and tacitly racist, reducing all jazz to a sort of primitive expression of raw feeling and undervaluing the role of intellect in the creation of the music. It's an argument that's not without some merit, as his lengthy attacks on James Lincoln Collier (particularly a scathing review of Collier's egregious Duke Ellington biography) show. But too many of the pieces here--the opening reviews of McCoy Tyner and Mary Lou Williams in particular--have little or nothing to do with this thesis. The best essays are reportage from the road, a previously unpublished piece on a jazz festival in Dahomey and a recounting of days and nights on tour with Wynton and his band. Piazza is a writer worth paying attention to, but this book is too slight a framework to support his arguments. In fact, it is too slight a framework to call a book. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.