Blumenthal grew up in St. Louis, and he discovered jazz at age 13 when he was looking for Ray Charles’s “What I Say” in a record store. The version he bought was on an album called Ray Charles in Person, but it wasn’t the hit single. In fact, half the numbers were instrumentals. If this was jazz, it was something he wanted to hear more of, and since jazz was “serious” music, he could probably find it in the public library, like classical music. He borrowed an album recorded at the Playboy Jazz Festival that offered celebrities like Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald but also Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, and Coleman Hawkins. That led to solo records by these artists, and to books about jazz. When he was 15, a serious jazz club opened in St. Louis. Within a period of six months he had seen: the John Coltrane Quartet; the Roland Kirk Quartet; Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, and Cedar Walton; Dizzy Gillespie with James Moody and Kenny Barron; the Sonny Rollins Our Man in Jazz group with Don Cherry, Henry Grimes, and Billy Higgins; and the Terry Gibbs Quartet with Alice McLeod, who later became Alice Coltrane. He was on his way.
As a Harvard undergraduate, he joined WHRB, attracted by the huge record library. Senior year he got a call from a BAD editor who’d heard his show. The Boston Globe was starting a jazz festival, and the pop-music writers at the paper didn’t know jazz — Blumenthal sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. And then the editor offered a pitch familiar to freelancers everywhere: “If you are willing to write a review, we’ll give you a pair of free tickets to the festival and the assurance that all your friends will be able to read your article when we distribute the paper to the dining halls in the colleges.” A career began — one that lasted through law school and 16 years as an attorney with the state Department of Education.
For Blumenthal, Boston’s golden age of jazz was the ’80s. “One night I went from Ruby Braff at the Regattabar to David Murray at Charlie’s Tap. I remember a Thursday night when I started at Charlie’s Tap and heard Henry Threadgill’s Sextett and then went to the Starlight Roof in Kenmore Square to hear Sheila Jordan and then Roswell Rudd and Beaver Harris at the 1369 in Inman Square. Sheila, who knew them both, said, ‘Oh, would you mind giving me a ride over there?’ ”
When he began, he thought the most important thing was to have an opinion — “that if you had good opinions, you could be basically illiterate if you could just stammer your way through them.” And, like all beginning critics, he relished the clever putdown. “Then you realize: you know what’s really hard? To be enthusiastic without sounding like a fawning tool! So that’s when you begin to worry a little bit more about how you say things and not just what you’re saying.”
At the Regattabar a week ago Tuesday, Blumenthal told a packed house about his life in jazz, read from the book, and sat down for an informal Q&A with his boss, Branford Marsalis. They sparred a bit over the quality of trumpeter Mugsy Spanier (champ or chump?) and then took questions from the audience. Someone asked for information about the semi-obscure singer King Pleasure. Blumenthal gave an extemporaneous two-minute biography: Pleasure’s real name, his recordings, his jukebox fame for “Moody’s Mood for Love,” his preference for tenor solos, etc. “And that’s all I know about King Pleasure,” he finished, almost apologetically. It was a knowledgeable audience, but chances are that what Blumenthal knew was more than anyone else in the room did.