Friends Along the Way: A Journey Through Jazz

Friends Along the Way: A Journey Through Jazz

A celebrated jazz writer offers fascinating portraits of friends he’s known during a lifetime in jazz For more than half a century, jazz writer and lyricist Gene Lees has been the friend of many in the world of jazz music. In this delightful book he offers minibiographies of fifteen of these friends—some of them jazz greats, some lesser-known figures, and some up-and-comers. Combining conversations and memoirs with critical commentary, Lees’s insightful and intimate profiles will captivate jazz fans, performers, and historians alike. The subjects of the book range from the versatile orchestrator and arranger Claus Ogerman to legendary jazz broadcaster Willis Conover, from the gifted young Chinese violinist Yue Deng to undersung pianist Junior Mance. Lees writes about these figures both as musicians and as human beings, and he writes out of a conviction that jazz as an art form represents the highest values of American culture. Inviting us into the lives of these unique individuals, Lees offers an affectionate view of the jazz community that only an insider could provide. For 20-odd years, Lees, whose short tenure as Down Beat editor dragged it into the mid-twentieth century, has published the eight-page, monthly Gene Lees Jazzletter . The subscribers are nearly all musicians, and few others would read Lees' lively, knowledgeable stuff if book publishers didn't pop for a collection now and then. Maybe even those few others are getting fewer, for Lees' passion is jazz as a popular music, which it last was during the big band era, and one has to be long in the tooth to recall that time directly. For those who care about how music is made, though, Lees' writing is perpetually interesting, for he gets seasoned pros to talk about what they do, and the things they say, while full of recollections of times and bands past, should remain cogent for as long as bands need arrangers and trombones, pianos, and saxophones are played. A marathon conversation, worth the book's price by itself, with trombonist and arranger Milt Bernhart opens a book that rarely descends from such heights. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "I think of Gene Lees as the Proust of jazz. His accounts of jazz musicians and their world give a sense of intimacy with the jazz scene that no other writer has been able to evoke." "These pieces represent the voice of a generation. Gene Lees's writings are a kind of last stand for the cultural values that marked a better time."-John McDonough, Down Beat, Wall Street Journal; "I think of Gene Lees as the Proust of jazz. His accounts of jazz musicians and their world give a sense of intimacy with the jazz scene that no other writer has been able to evoke."-Eric Nisenson, author of Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest Gene Lees is publisher and editor of the Jazzletter. He is also a song lyricist and the author of more than a dozen volumes of jazz history and criticism, among them Singers and the Song, Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White, Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s: Jazz Musicians and Their World, and a forthcoming biography of Johnny Mercer.