Overview

When jazz musicians get together, they often delight one another with stories about the great, or merely remarkable, players and singers they've worked with. One good story leads to another until someone says, ""Somebody ought to wrie these down!"" With Jazz Anecdotes, somebody finally has. Drawing on a rich verbal tradition, bassist and jazz writer Bill Crow has culled stories from a wide variety of sources, including interviews, biographies and a remarkable oral history collection, which resides at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, to paint fascinating and very human portraits of jazz musicians. Organized around general topics--teaching and learning, life on the road, prejudice and discrimination, and the importance of a good nickname--Jazz Anecdotes shows the jazz world as it really is. In this fully updated edition, which contains over 150 new anecdotes and new topics like Hiring and Firing, Crow regales us with new stories of such jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Ravi Coltrane, Buddy Rich and Paul Desmond. He offers extended sections on old favorites--Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and the fabulous Eddie Condon, who seems to have lived his entire life with the anecdotist in mind. With its unique blend of sparkling dialogue and historical and social insight, Jazz Anecdotes will delight anyone who loves a good story. It offers a fresh perspective on the joys and hardships of a musician's life as well as a rare glimpse of the personalities who created America's most distinctive music.

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9780195187953

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Reviews

A scintillating omnium gathering of jazz talk. Washington Post Guarantees up to a thousand laughs...recommended without reservation. Los Angeles Times The intense sociological hothouse that was the jazz and commercial music world has cooled down greatly over the years, but it's important to have books like this to remind us how exciting and invigorating those days were...Don't let it slip by. Allegro Read this somewhere where you're not afraid to be seen laughing out loud...Everyone should be able to find something to like in this rich collection. Library Journal

A scintillating omnium gathering of jazz talk. Washington Post Guarantees up to a thousand laughs...recommended without reservation. Los Angeles Times The intense sociological hothouse that was the jazz and commercial music world has cooled down greatly over the years, but it's important to have books like this to remind us how exciting and invigorating those days were...Don't let it slip by. Allegro Read this somewhere where you're not afraid to be seen laughing out loud...Everyone should be able to find something to like in this rich collection. Library Journal

Praise for the previous edition Guarantees up to a thousand laughs...recommended without reservation. --Los Angeles Times Read this somewhere where you're not afraid to be seen laughing out loud.... Everyone should be able to find something to like in this rich collection. --Library Journal When Bill Crow's book was published in 1990 it became an instant classic. Now I am in pain with sore ribs from reading its [expanded] successor. There's something hilarious from every corner of jazz and all the accounts are vivid and lucid [due to] Crow's elegant and erudite style of writing. I know from experience how difficult it is to re-write anecdotes that others have told. Crow does it admirably and masterfully. It would be impossible not to enjoy the book. It has the unintended function of serving as a great reference work, too. My compliments to the chef. --Steve Voce, Duke Ellington Music Society

Author Information

Bill Crow is a free-lance musician in the New York City area. He writes a monthly humor column for Allegro, published monthly by Local 802, American Federation of Musicians.

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