Book Review-A Thousand Honey Creeks Later

Book Review :Preston love- A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life in Music from Basie to Motown

To a jazz history enthusiast that came of age during the halcyon days of Berry Gordy’s Motown empire, this title practically jumped off the shelf the first time I saw it. I wasn’t familiar with saxophonist Preston Love, but reasoned that anyone who had played in the two disparate settings mentioned in the subtitle just had to have something to say. As it turns out he had plenty to say. That he was a genuine workaday musician, rather than a star, made it all the more appealing. Love tells his story without glamour or complaint, giving equal billing to the music and to the business of music. His is one of the most illuminating accounts ever of life on the bus.

Unlike so many music biographies that are rife with tales of exaggeration and excess, Love’s book treats the music both lovingly and critically, while taking a pragmatist’s view of the business. The impression that emerges is one of a hard working musician with a practical side, one destined to become a leader of his own ensembles. From his early days in Midwest territory bands to his years as musical director for Motown on the West Coast, Preston Love comes across as a genuine soul, willing to reveal his insecurities along with his triumphs.

Like so many books by and about African-American musicians in this culture, this one has at its core the theme of racial tension. There are the stories of segregated theaters, hotels, and restaurants, which Love seems to have taken in stride in describing his most prolific years as a player on the road. There is however a notable change in temperament in the book’s final two chapters, which Love added to the book in the eighties and nineties. (It had originally ended with the chapter on the Motown years.) Particularly in the final chapter, entitled Perspectives, he begins to ramble on a bit about many of the familiar discourses in jazz. He takes white musicians to task for their inability to play jazz and blues, he summarily dismisses entire genres of modern music and complains about the very corporate greed that fed him pretty well as a Motown musical director. The generalizations begin to get a bit tedious at times, but rants can be compelling, and this one is.

Despite the inconsistency, this is a book I highly recommend. Covering such a long period in American popular music, it offers an insider's view of a music in evolution. A companion book I would suggest is Blues Upside Your Head by Johnny Otis. Otis and Love were contemporaries and good friends, and taken together their books offer a comprehensive look at roughly the same period in the history of jazz and rhythm and blues.

- Richard Mayer