jazz books

[Big Beat Steve]

Don't have the info in front of me, but Dan Morgenstern has expounded at length on the numerous fabulations in both Ross Russell's Bird bio and his book on KC jazz.

Details of what Dan Morgenstern found in need of correction in Ross Russell's KC book would be welcome indeed as they can only be beneficial to the reader, so ... please ...

[Christiern]

Steve, I think one would pretty much have to write a new book were one to mention everything that needs correction in Ross's. It's not an uninteresting read—I rather enjoyed it many years ago, but it just wasn't so.

[Larry Kart]

What Chris said is the impression I got from Dan. IIRC, his comments on the book and the Bird bio were made to me in conversation several times over the years, not in written form. His judgment in both cases was that it wasn't a matter of factual errors but of complete fabulations.

[gmonahan]

Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

gregmo

[AllenLowe]

well, for one thing, the whole way he describes the first trip West, to Billy Berg's, is completely fabricated. Audience reaction was not anything like described.

[Lazaro Vega]

Well, there are the Miles Davis biographies by Jack Chambers and Ian Carr, as well as his Autobiography with Quincy Troupe. The writers of "Infatuation," the new Fats Navarro biography, take Troupe to task on some sort of summery ideas that appeared in previous sources that show up in the Miles autobiography; and then we see Troupe's tape log quoted directly in the new Monk bio, sort of side-stepping the credibility issue. Important information to be aquainted with none the less.

[medjuck]

I suspect that Miles and Troupe used the Chambers book to prod Miles into remembering things. At times Miles complains about mistakes in bios and used examples found in Chambers but at other times virtually quotes him. Chambers wrote a funny review of teh autobiography in which he said something like "sometimes Miles sounds like this, sometimes like that and sometimes like me."

[RJ Spangler]

Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

gregmo

Thanks for the heads up -- I just ordered "Drew Page's: Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands" from Amazon -- $5.77 including shipping!

[gmonahan]

Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

gregmo

Thanks for the heads up -- I just ordered "Drew Page's: Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands" from Amazon -- $5.77 including shipping!

I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. Like I said, hardly an essential jazz classic, but interesting reading.

gregmo

[RJ Spangler]

Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

gregmo

Thanks for the heads up -- I just ordered "Drew Page's: Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands" from Amazon -- $5.77 including shipping!

I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. Like I said, hardly an essential jazz classic, but interesting reading.

gregmo

I find many of the lesser known cats to be very interesting! I finished the Mike Zwerin book and started Max Kaminky's book yesterday.

[fomafomic65]

My own copy of the Fats Navarro bio arrived yesterday, and I've absorbed my bit of bios of jazz and jazz-related artists through the years mself. Starting out with Ross Russell's Charlie Parker bio in my very young collecting days, and followed later on by the autobios of Count Basie, Charlie Barnet and Terry Gibbs, plus bios on Woody Herman, Dexter Gordon, another one on Bird, then Lester Young, Tommy Dorsey, Kenny Clarke, Hal Singer, Dick Twardzik, Louis Jordan, plus others on the fringe of jazz such as Muddy Waters, Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, Bob Wills, Pee Wee King, Milton Brown, Big Jay McNeely, Wynonie Haris, etc. And no doubt others will follow in due course.

Clearly, a vast number of jazz biographies have been written, but which ones really stick in your mind - which do you consider unmissable? This would be a useful guide to me as to what to seek out next. My own list would have to include Art Pepper's Straight Life, Hampton Hawes's Raise Up Off Me and, possibly, Ross Russell's Bird Lives!. Also, in my youth I was very impressed by Alan Lomax's Mister Jelly Roll.

I feel kind of "unmissable" Evan's biography How My Heart Sing, Coltrane's The Life And Music Of J.C.

I love and I am emotively linked to Pepper's Straight Life and Anita O'Day's High Times, Hard Times, which complement ich other in a kind of borderline way (...). Another masterpiece of a jazz autobiography may well be An Unsung Cat, the life of Warne Marsh and the peculiar bio-interview with Lee Konitz recently published; its name fails me now I'm far from my library but it is really excellent and deserves to be considered.

[AllenLowe]

all excellent choices - Max Kaminsky, ODay, Pepper - especially the Kaminsky-

[Larry Kart]

Will have to finish it some day, but Pee Wee Erwin's autobiography "This Horn For Hire" seemed excellent until the point I was interrupted and began to read something else. Also, here is a piece I wrote about Arthur Rollini's excellent autobiography:

[1987]

Arthur Rollini’s name does not loom large in the history of jazz, even though he was the younger brother of a major artist (bass saxophonist and mallet percussionist Adrian Rollini) and a member of Benny Goodman’s saxophone section from the inception of Goodman’s band until 1939. But perhaps because of his cog-in-the-wheel status, Rollini has written a very moving autobiography , Thirty Years With the Big Bands --a book that captures the feel of the Swing Era from a sideman’s point of view with an attractive blend of stoicism and wit.

Rollini’s tale also is suffused with a casual, peculiarly American grace, as though, like one of Sherwood Anderson’s narrators, the seeming innocence with which he addresses us were essential to his message. Rollini records that any early childhood memory was of “the brass and crystal Ansonia clock on our mantel, which never ceased functioning as long as it was wound every eighth day. It was always wound on time, and its little mercury pendulum kept beating back and forth and intrigued me. I would view it for hours.”

Nothing more than nostalgia, one thinks, until, several pages and decade or so further on, Rollini’s father dies and “the only sound in the living room was the little clock on the mantel, which ticked away and gonged softly on the hour and half hour, its little pendulum still beating back and forth in perfect rhythm.”

Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Rollini was a professional musician at age seventeen--traveling to London to work with Fred Elizade’s orchestra at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince of Wales often sat in on drums. (“He was, let us put it this way, not too good,” Rollini says.)

Jazz fans will be most interested in Rollini’s account of his time with Benny Goodman, which confirms the widely held belief that Goodman was a difficult man to get along with. “Inconsiderate Benny, the best jazz clarinetist in the world!”--Rollini uses that tag, and variations thereof, time after time, even when a harsher adjective than “inconsiderate” might apply.

Rollini and Dick Clark were Goodman’s initial tenor saxophonists, and “even at this stage,” Rollini says, “Benny would look at Dick’s bald head with disdain. He wanted a youthful looking band. ‘Fickle Benny,’ I thought, ‘the best jazz clarinetist in the world!’ Dick was a good player.”

Quietly authoritative, Rollini’s tales of the sideman’s happy-sad life have a cumulative power. And two of them, when placed side by side, virtually define the big-band musician’s paradoxical role.

In the first, Rollini is playing a dance with Goodman when he meets an old high school friend, one Johnny Baker, who requests that the band play “Always,” on the recording of which Rollini had a solo. At the dance, Rollini deliberately plays “something entirely different from what was on our recording, and after it was over Johnny Baker said to me, ‘What did you change it for?’”

Then, in the mid-1940s, when Rollini was an NBC Radio staff musician, he stops in a Manhattan bar after work and notices that “two young men were playing the jukebox and had selected Will Bradley’s ‘Request for a Rhumba,’ which we had recorded in 1941. Finally I stepped off the bar stool and asked, “Boys, why are you playing that record over and over?” One replied, “We like the tenor sax solo.” I felt elated, but did not tell them that it was I who played it.”

[RJ Spangler]

I just ordered Pee Wee Erwin's autobiography "This Horn For Hire" used from Amazon as well as "Thirty Years With the Big Bands" ~ thanks for pulling my coat! I finished the Kaminsky book, which I found an easy read. His perspective concerning the boppers coming along after the swing era was quite interesting.

[gmonahan]

Will have to finish it some day, but Pee Wee Erwin's autobiography "This Horn For Hire" seemed excellent until the point I was interrupted and began to read something else. Also, here is a piece I wrote about Arthur Rollini's excellent autobiography:

[1987]

Arthur Rollini’s name does not loom large in the history of jazz, even though he was the younger brother of a major artist (bass saxophonist and mallet percussionist Adrian Rollini) and a member of Benny Goodman’s saxophone section from the inception of Goodman’s band until 1939. But perhaps because of his cog-in-the-wheel status, Rollini has written a very moving autobiography , Thirty Years With the Big Bands --a book that captures the feel of the Swing Era from a sideman’s point of view with an attractive blend of stoicism and wit.

Rollini’s tale also is suffused with a casual, peculiarly American grace, as though, like one of Sherwood Anderson’s narrators, the seeming innocence with which he addresses us were essential to his message. Rollini records that any early childhood memory was of “the brass and crystal Ansonia clock on our mantel, which never ceased functioning as long as it was wound every eighth day. It was always wound on time, and its little mercury pendulum kept beating back and forth and intrigued me. I would view it for hours.”

Nothing more than nostalgia, one thinks, until, several pages and decade or so further on, Rollini’s father dies and “the only sound in the living room was the little clock on the mantel, which ticked away and gonged softly on the hour and half hour, its little pendulum still beating back and forth in perfect rhythm.”

Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Rollini was a professional musician at age seventeen--traveling to London to work with Fred Elizade’s orchestra at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince of Wales often sat in on drums. (“He was, let us put it this way, not too good,” Rollini says.)

Jazz fans will be most interested in Rollini’s account of his time with Benny Goodman, which confirms the widely held belief that Goodman was a difficult man to get along with. “Inconsiderate Benny, the best jazz clarinetist in the world!”--Rollini uses that tag, and variations thereof, time after time, even when a harsher adjective than “inconsiderate” might apply.

Rollini and Dick Clark were Goodman’s initial tenor saxophonists, and “even at this stage,” Rollini says, “Benny would look at Dick’s bald head with disdain. He wanted a youthful looking band. ‘Fickle Benny,’ I thought, ‘the best jazz clarinetist in the world!’ Dick was a good player.”

Quietly authoritative, Rollini’s tales of the sideman’s happy-sad life have a cumulative power. And two of them, when placed side by side, virtually define the big-band musician’s paradoxical role.

In the first, Rollini is playing a dance with Goodman when he meets an old high school friend, one Johnny Baker, who requests that the band play “Always,” on the recording of which Rollini had a solo. At the dance, Rollini deliberately plays “something entirely different from what was on our recording, and after it was over Johnny Baker said to me, ‘What did you change it for?’”

Then, in the mid-1940s, when Rollini was an NBC Radio staff musician, he stops in a Manhattan bar after work and notices that “two young men were playing the jukebox and had selected Will Bradley’s ‘Request for a Rhumba,’ which we had recorded in 1941. Finally I stepped off the bar stool and asked, “Boys, why are you playing that record over and over?” One replied, “We like the tenor sax solo.” I felt elated, but did not tell them that it was I who played it.”

I've not heard of this one. I'll try and locate a copy!

gregmo