Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century
Bill Beuttler
304 Pages
ISBN: #978-1643150055 (13)
Lever Press
2019

Journalist Bill Beuttler modeled this book after Joe Goldberg's Jazz Masters of the 50s (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1965). It devoted a chapter each to a dozen musicians, providing a snapshot of where jazz stood as it entered the 1960s. Beuttler attempts to give a similar sense of where jazz stands today, through the stories of eight artists who rose to prominence around the year 2000. The chapters read like magazine profiles, giving readers the option of reading them in whatever order they prefer. The main challenge was deciding which artists to include, and as the book's title implies, there is an agenda behind the choices.

He was looking for musicians who were taking jazz to new places, as opposed to carrying on styles which were already being established when Goldberg's book was published. Jazz with both intellectual and visceral appeal was the goal: music which had a chance of appealing to listeners who were not already jazz aficionados. Finally, he wanted people who illustrated how significantly jazz had changed over the fifteen years between 1987 (when Beuttler left his editing job at Downbeat) and 2002 (when he started writing weekly on jazz for the Boston Globe).

A lengthy introductory chapter discusses the stylistic question in depth. Many of the profiled musicians are not entirely comfortable calling their music "jazz," but this is a question as old as the music itself. Even the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by trumpeter