Which jazz book are you reading right now?

[Big Beat Steve]

46 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Interesting ... and apparently totally under everyone's radar with all that "Listening" talk about Prestige during recent months ...  But ouch ... what a hefty price. 
I'm tempted but am very much on the fence, given how many Prestiges are on my shelves anyway and how many have been shown "for art's sake" in previous books such as "East Coasting" and "Jazzical Moods". 
We'll see ...

 

[sgcim]

Just finished "The Jazz Barn : Music Inn The Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life" by John Gennari,

Had to do with the Lennox School of Jazz, where Third Stream musicians like Gunther Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell and John Lewis taught for the four years it was open.

It goes for 80 pages before anything relating to jazz is mentioned, just woke history of the Berkshires. 

When he mentions the School of Jazz and the concerts they had there, it begins to get interesting, and there are a lot of pictures of some of the teachers and students there that have never been seen before. 

The author is an English Prof. in VT, who thinks that Dave Brubeck composed "Take Five". The type on the book is so small that I had trouble reading iit.

 

[John Tapscott]

[sgcim]

Just finished "At the Jazz Band Ball" by Nat Hentoff. Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene"

I read his YA novel "Jazz Country" as a kid from my school's library, and liked it so much, I never returned it.

The book "ATJBB" is just a series of interviews and magazine pieces that he wrote from 2004-2009.

There's a lot of repetition by NH regarding quotes he repeats in each interview from Ben Webster, Dizzy, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, Hank Jones,etc... that could have been edited out, and there's a jazz and politics section that I just skipped over, but other than those two things, it had some great stuff.

Other than the free stuff, I liked his taste in music, and there was a chapter on Phil Woods which was great. I never knew NH was a Woods fanatic, and that he produced Woods' one release on Candid which Nat owned.

Towards the end, it starts to get deadly serious with two great interviews he did with Jon Faddis and Ron Carter.

Where else would you learn that the Black press in NYC plus Oprah both hated jazz, and did their best to kill it off?

Jon Faddis is very candid about the realities of being a jazz musician in those years, and doesn't sugarcoat anything.

Ron also tells it like it is, and it ain't very pretty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JSngry]

Archie Bleyer owned Candid. Hentoff was A&R.