Total Jazz by Blutch

Total Jazz Reviews

• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  I don't really have anything that I could add to EisNine's breathtaking review of this collection of wordless Jazz comics that appeared in Jazzman magazine for many years.
  
  
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
  
  It features moments in performances, audiences. It feels sketchily improvised in the way jazz is improvised. Expressive lines. Capturing Blutch's passion for jazz.
• 
  EisΝinΕ|v|XenoFoneX

  'Comics & Music Don't Mix': 'Total Jazz', A Light-weight Collection of Music-themed Comic Stories by Blutch, for Blutch; & an Annoying, Improvised-Then-Heavily-Edited Jazz Riff of a Review
  From 'Vitesse Moderne', by Blutch:
  
  
  With a title like 'Total Jazz', it's no secret that Blutch is a passionate Jazz aficionado... something I pretend to be once in a while. I've even made sincere attempts to salvage the musical relationship, but it was mutually decided that due to irreconcilable differences, an amicable separation was for the best. That makes my pseudo-fandom a second cousin to 'the truth', or maybe even a weird uncle. Not true enough to survive an encounter with CIA waterboarding, an FBI lie detector, or a black-belt in the art of the Raised & Dubious Eyebrow, but true enough for someone who's slightly dumb and/or slightly drunk and vaguely impressed by that sort of thing. Unfortunately, a few hours of Coltrane were all it took to condition a murder-happy Pavlovian response to any and all wind-instruments. I tried to assassinate a Scottish Bag-piper before I could speak in complete sentences or support the weight of my own head. That was last week.
  
  Blutch's Jazz-inspired Stories. Who said music is an awful subject for the comic medium? Fort Thunder did. It is. Fortunately, Blutch captures the soiled-sophistication of Jazz culture perfectly, by keeping it very light. One and two page stories with artwork that demonstrates Blutch's range and expressionistic comic-art genius:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  No, not really. That was a lie. All of it. Some of it. I've lost track. Sometimes I enjoy pretending to be someone who pretends to like jazz, but who actually harbors a neurotic hatred of jazz due to some kind of jazzy, trombone-related childhood trauma. I actually like jazz, especially when weed and alcohol are involved. Sometimes my essential whiteness reasserts itself, since most of my vinyl collection is devoted to 'Radiohead', 'Fugazi', obscure, noisy hardcore, and stuff like 'Godspeed You! Black Emperor', 'City of Caterpillar' and 'Blut Aus Nord'... But Miles Davis'** 'Bitches Brew' is fucking RAD (I'm trying to rehabilitate the word 'rad', but it's utterly incorrigible). This will take me on an impulsive and lovely tangent, since the double-sided art for 'Bitches Brew' is one of the greatest LP covers of all time, by the painter Mati Klarwein.
  
  A few classic covers by the criminally undervalued Mati Klarwein: Miles Davis' 'Bitches' Brew' and Santana's 'Abraxas', which I bought mostly for the cover:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  And now I'll pivot awkwardly from Klarwein to his artistic mentor and the founder of Fantastic Realism, Ernst Fuchs, smooth as chunky peanut butter...
  
  Flimsy Pretexts are my favorite kind of Pretext, though Raspberry Pretexts are delicious:
  
  
  
  
  More Fantastic Realism, from Werner Tubke:
  
  
  
  
  More Fantastic Realism, this time from Werner Tubke's protege, Michael Triegel:
  
  
  
  Now I'm getting dangerously close to off-key with my barely relevant chromatic meanderings, but... meh. John Zorn! John Zorn's Jazz experiments; his 'Naked City' phase fused jazz and grindcore, and an old LP from the 90's introduced me to a wild and predatory Jazz that was far more appealing than the domesticated, house-broken jazz that curls up in your lap and purrs. Any music that gan be converted into sleep-inducing muzak sucks. Zorn's album covers also introduced me to the work of Ero-Guro master Suehiro Maruo, so I'll post those to freak someone out.
  
  Suehiro Maruo, for the bloody squealing fuck of it; his disturbing as hell John Zorn covers:
  
  
  
  
  Everyone likes the idea of jazz, with it's air of soiled sophistication and ashtray art-scene atmosphere. Y'know, Beat poetry and Bourbon and dudes in well-tailored suits they've been wearing a week straight; smoking Gauloises and shooting morphine through an old-timey glass and steel syringe that's large enough to inseminate an elephant. It's cool... But I get it when people find it annoying, especially when you're faced with a masturbatory half-hour saxophone solo that makes the douchiest Grateful Dead jam seem like a model of restraint. Without weed, all that squealing, whining, and squawking can occasionally hit frequencies that vibrate like insectoid prey plucking the primordial attack-strand in the webwork of the arachnid brain. I'm sure that's fairly common, and not psychotic in the least.
  
  Now I remember! Blutch!
  
  
  
  
  
  I'm still not sure music is a subject that sequential art is suited for, since the passage of time is illusory, and it remains a static art form, read in sequence. As for 'Total Jazz', Blutch isn't faking the love, but he's hip to the love-hate quandaries that keep Jazz-poser's awake at night. With 'Total Jazz', you can enjoy all the awesomeness of Jazz without actually being forced to fucking listen to it! It's genius! And French publisher Cornelius once again cement their place as the publisher of the world's most beautiful collections of comic art. It's an over-sized, 9 x 12-inch hardcover with a clothbound spine and pictorial boards, specially designed end-paper motifs and solid binding... more art-book than comic. That said, if you're not a fan of Blutch the artist, this will probably seem a bit too light on story. The best places to start with Blutch's beautifully rendered weirdness are 'Vitesse Moderne', 'Peplum' and 'Le Petit Christian'.
  
  Here's a metaphorical fusion of music and comics that works, from Rafael Grampa's 'Mesmo Delivery' (and another tasty, thin-sliced pretext for showing off some amazing work):
  
  
  
  
  
  Jim Woodring has collaborated with brilliant jazz guitarist Bill Frisell on many occasions, providing visual narratives for concerts and books like 'Trosper', which includes a CD; Charles Burns and Killoffer collaborated with Will Oldham on 'In the Garden of Evil', an eerie and atmospheric 7-inch single that ships with the hand-stitched, hand-signed ltd. edition single. I purchased it directly from Pigeon Press, a.k.a. Alvin Buenaventura. He was the writer-editor of Dan Clowes' fantastic art monograph for Abrams, 'Modern Cartoonist', as well as the 'Kramer's Ergot' co-editor/publisher who made KE 5, 6, and 7 the modern classics they are. He even included a very nice thank you note with my mid-size order, which was thoughtful. I was sad to learn he committed suicide less than a week after sending it off. The fact he was in intense mental anguish, and yet still made sure to complete his outstanding orders, speaks to a self-less and kind individual... and gives that comic and song an extra layer of poignancy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  *FOOTNOTE:
  
  
  'The Comics Journal' handed its reins to the Highwater Books-Fort Thunder crew for a single issue, back when TCJ was still a monthly magazine, and Fort Thunder was still a thing. If you don't remember Highwater or Fort Thunder, you should be crippled by a deep and abiding shame. No, not really. 'Fort Thunder' was the name given to an unremarkable chunk of real estate that became the headquarters for a rotating cast of students and Rhode Island School of Design refugees, including Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Greg Cook, Megan Kelso, and Brian Ralph. Continuing in the tradition of Zap!, Arcade and Raw, Fort Thunder became one of those rare stellar giants that pulls an impossibly dense cluster of comic talent into its gravity well before going supernova or collapsing into a black hole of super-suck. Thankfully it was the former, though the 7 years of high-rev creativity that preceded the explosion was read about, more than it was read. There was a lot of ponderous, pretentious experimental art-fail bullshit between the brilliant stellar flares. Highwater Books was founded by Tom Devlin, the publisher who turned Fort Thunder's shit-smeared pages of original art into shit-smeared books that were art-objects in their own right. Smelly, but very cool.
  Fort Thunder, in all it's banal glory; at top, some of FT-Highwater's prolific and unique art-comic output; pics two and three are both of Brian Chippendale at FTHQ, in Lightning Bolt uniform, and showing off the FT attack-cats:
  
  
  
  
  Seizing control of TCJ, The Fort Thunder cartoonists were in prime snark-tastic form: they hated Prince Valiant and Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, and summarily dismissed 'representative art' in comics, which is just idiotic. They hated everything about mainstream comics and most of the independent comics of the time, including the flagship Fantagraphics titles. A running email conversation was reprinted in one continuous line of minuscule print across the top and bottom margins; it showed off the unfiltered opinions of the snarkiest, most defiantly pretentious, snotty, and hyper-critical pricks in 'TCJ' history... and this was a magazine whose modus operandi was picking fights and calling out the hack writers and hack artists who were pushing the medium deeper into its moribund creative coma. One of these Fort Thunder cartoonists was co-founder Brian Chippendale (who's still receiving critical praise for books like 'Ninja 69', 'Maggots', and 'Iff n' Oof'); I was shocked to learn that he was also one of the two members of the arty noisecore band 'Lightning Bolt'. He was part of the snarky email thread about everything wrong with comics. While all the contributors had their own kennel full of snarling pet peeves, one point in particular was unanimously agreed upon: Music & Comics Don't Mix. I tend to agree, but I can think of a few exceptions...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  **FOOTNOTE: One of my favorite Miles Davis riffs is from a live album, where the instrument is his barely restrained hatred and the heroin's playing the tune, as he spits mellifluous vitriol at the mostly white audience and delivers the word 'motherfucker' with a venomous beauty that no one but Samuel L. Jackson has come close to rivaling. Ironically, he was yelling at white people who actually liked him, at a time when there were still millions of redneck scumbags telling nigger jokes and spitting on interracial couples. In fairness, his white fans just sat there and took it - "Yeah, fuck white people." - making them the smart choice for venting. They were a lot safer to abuse than the cross-burning cro-mag lynch-a-lot scumbags to the south.
• 
  Adam Stone

  The description of the book mentions that the cartoonist "examines not only the music, but the nature of the jazz sub-culture." This is not precisely true. I do not doubt that Blutch is a huge jazz fan. I do not question his knowledge or passion. Just don't pick this book up expecting anything other than New Yorker/Mad Magazine level cartoons about American Jazz as it is interpreted by a French white guy.
  
  There's nothing wrong with that. I am impressed by the many different penciling styles Blutch adapts for this project, but it certainly reads more like an out-of-touch nostalgia book than a graphic novel about jazz. And it IS a bunch of very old cartoons. This new printing is just a repackaging of a twenty year old collection of comics that I hoped were at least twenty years old when it was printed, but the Jazzman strips appear to be from the 90s and early 2000s.
  
  As I read first the intro where "Pink Cloud" the Native American representation of the author talks with "Great Sachem", the Native American representation of...the author, and thought "If this guy isn't Native American than fuck this guy." He is French.
  
  The first comic is also about Native Americans who talk precisely like Native Americans in movies from the 1950s. And when he gets around to the jazz portion of the book it is very much through the lens of a French guy looking at American culture. And that's a totally valid lens for a collection of cartoons. But I just don't see this appealing to very many people who don't already own the magazines that these were originally printed in.
  
  I know there is a vast difference between American and European (and particularly French) cartooning and comics, particularly from a cultural standpoint. I had many conversations about it during the Je Suis Charlie era. While I don't think any offense or harm was planned in the making of these comics, I also don't enjoy this particular style. There are plenty of French cartoonists whose work I do enjoy.. And, from a technical standpoint, I do like Blutch's work. I just don't care for the subject matter, the way I don't care for cartoons from Playboy or The New Yorker. I would much rather see more French artists who drew/wrote about France or Europe or sci-fi or fantasy than what a French cartoonist thinks about American culture.
  
  I recommend it to people who are already looking for a collection of Blutch's Jazzman magazine comics, and people who are really curuous what a fifty year old French guy thought of American culture back in the late 20th/early 21st culture.
• 
  Jesús

  A collection of (mostly) one-page comics about jazz and jazz fandom. Too often falls into the traps of nostalgia and exoticism.
  
  If there is an overarching theme to these comics, it seems to be saying that only lonely, dumpy, middle-aged white men truly “get” jazz. Considering the original audience for these comics (collected from a European jazz aficionado magazine), probably not surprising. Just disappointing.
• 
  Keith Kavanagh

  should be called total jizz as the pages were stuck together when I was done with it
• 
  Amy Layton

  This was such a great collection of one-shot comics!  Following the lives of some jazz artists, to those trying to break into the game, to a professed and so-called "jazz detective", each comic gets to the root of the genre: it's simultaneously everlasting and ever-changing.  Told via a variety of illustrative styles and manner of comics, Blutch certainly makes his point just as jazz itself does.  
  
  This is great for the music- and jazz-lover, and for anyone who understands what the music industry can be like, especially as an instrumentalist!  Overall, this is a fun and entertaining look at a genre we're all accustomed to.
  
  Review cross-listed
  here!
• 
  Kevin Hodgson

  Prob only for diehard jazz fans, and some of the comics here didn’t quite work for me, and a couple I found offensive in terms of treatment of women. But some of the others wonderfully capture the tangled spirit of jazz music and being a fan. So, mixed bag.
• 
  Milan Šabić

  Great show of style by one of Europe’s most prominent artists.
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  Sam Asthana

  An interesting collection of cartoons by Blutch about jazz. His art is certainly very enthralling and intriguing. I think I appreciate Blutch’s attempts at making deep statements about the nature of jazz and music making, but ultimately found them to be very “cold takes” at times. I was also a little confused at how comfortable this white non-musician individual was assuming the identity of black musicians (and a Native American character in his prologue?). Some of the comedy hit well, but I think Blutch was at his best when he was just staying true to his thesis statement of attempting to show music in a concrete image. My favorite cartoon was “The Abstract Truth”.
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  Andy

  If we can bask in R. Crumb's love of vintage blues and jug band comics then we can check out Blutch's comics of mid-century jazz greats. Total Jazz is an assortment of strips he contributed to a French jazz magazine through the years.
  
  There are short strips about Miles, Mingus, Chet Baker, Sun Ra and many others. Blutch also gives us a few insightful strips about how the general public perceives jazz and their biggest fans, too. I also really enjoyed all the hepcat musician funnies. Blutch said he has a huge backlog of these jazz strips, so fingers crossed for a Total Jazz, Voiume 2.
• 
  Ryan Werner

  This was fun and quick, but like most compilations of weekly/monthly strips, I think these are better served in singularity with space between them. The scratchy style is perfect for the way Blutch sees the aura of jazz: chaotic, but defined.
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  Carly

  I was so excited to read comics about this wonderful genre and not only was I disappointed by the lack of substantive content but I was affronted with racist stereotyping and often hyper-sexualized or minstrel-like caricatures of black and indigenous folks (which made sense when I realized this was written by a white French man attempting and failing to portray a beautiful and creative subculture of music¿?) he attempts to address racist depictions of jazz as a genre at one point but this attempt is totally undermined by his own use of those stereotypes of violent or hyper sexualizas behavior. So in conclusion this sucked, don’t bother reading except if for applied critical theory critique… I was super disappointed cause I just wanted to have fun reading about my fave music.
  
  Also just read this review for more good criticism:
  
  
  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.avcl...
• 
  Jeff

  Writing about music in general, and instrumental music in particular, is always challenging, since the very attraction of music is its ability to defy description (other than in the most rudimentary terms). And then there is jazz music, whose endlessly mutable nature means that it has already changed by the time a writer tries to capture something about it on the page.
  
  Blutch is a visual artist, so his approach has advantages over the written word. Total Jazz collects short comics he created for the French-language "Jazzman" magazine, and most of them succeed in articulating something about the music and the culture of jazz without attempting to express what only the notes themselves can. When it all comes together, as in "Sonny Sharrock", Blutch highlights critical moments in the experience of the music, presenting the reflection from the mirror, rather than attempting to paint a full portrait.
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  Przemysław Skoczyński

  Zbiór głównie jednostronicowych impresji, które ciężko nawet nazwać historiami (dłuższe wyjątki do policzenia na palcach jednej ręki). Blutch potrafi coś co trudno sobie wyobrazić, oddaje charakter jazzu rysunkiem i jest w tej kategorii mistrzem. Specyfika tych obrazków pełna jest nostalgii i swoistej poezji, o której ciężko się pisze. Autor przemycił tu coś niepowtarzalnego, klimat, który już nie wróci, doświadczenia słuchaczy, których nie da się przeżyć ponownie, bo są jednorazowe i przynależne do swojej epoki. Piękne to, choć specyficzne. Dla fanów jazzu i komiksu z pewnością, choć obawiam się o miłośników komiksu, którzy mogą docenić kunszt, ale nie czują tematu.
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  Caitlin Garfias Chan

  *1.5/5
  
  As a former jazz/contemporary studies major, I honestly had high hopes for this one... and oh boy.
  
  The intro was very confusing and set me off the entire time I read it. I will say though that the historical facts were very accurate, and nothing was totally inaccurate. I think the only thing I actually was okay with was when Miles Davis came in. Other than that, I really did not enjoy the way this was executed. While I understand this was a compilation of comics rolled into a book, I have learned I am not a fan of this layout.
  
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  John

  Bonus star for so perfectly pandering to my interests. Blutch did one-page comics for a French jazz magazine for years and this collects some of the best ones. His visual style reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman and the early days of Mad, his comic timing especially. One thing he does terrifically is represent visually the sound pouring out of people.
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  Jake Nap

  Solid collection of Jazz related short stories. Most are 1 pages and most are done with no dialogue, but Blutch captures jazz perfectly within these pages. I wish there were more multi-page stories, I absolutely loved all of those.
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  StrictlySequential

  "grainy" covers-> if sticker remover skip ex-library
  
  It's too jazz history nerdy but remains interesting and funny anyways.
  
  The art is his usual super sketchiness but it roughs it up well enough.
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  James

  Some of the drawings are pretty dated, but taken in context as a collection of monthlies they're fairly interesting. I'm surprised this was the best after 20 years though as some arent as strong as the others, and it can be a bit mish mash.
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  Rob Schamberger

  ‘The Life of an Artist’ alone makes this a masterpiece. Put on your favorite jazz album and prepare yourself for a wonderful immersive adventure!
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  Terrence

  I enjoyed the artist's style, yet would like more of a story. Perhaps we will see a second volume? I am interested.
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  Simon Sweetman

  Some amazing strips here, great stories and wonderful drawings. Real passion.
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  Aaron

  If you're a Jazz/music fan, this is a must. The art is so cool. I didn't give it five stars, because I wished there were more pages. Lol! But otherwise awesome.
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  Al McCarty

  I adore this volume. Blutch is the best. I wish that I had drawn it.
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  Michael

  Read Harder 2023 #8. Read a graphic novel/comic/manga if you haven’t before; or read one that is a different genre than you normally read.
  
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  Alexa

  Not what I was expecting unfortunately. I'm a big jazz fan, but I just didn't really enjoy it.