Overview

Jim and Andy's on 48th Street was a favourite haunt of New York musicians in the 1960s. This book gives vivid portraits of its clientele, including Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, and Bill Evans.

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9780195065800

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Reviews

Lees' excellent Singers and the Song (1987) extolled the tradition of American song-writing; now he has gathered together another collection of his occasional writings, this time on jazz and its proponents and practictioners. Jim and Andy's was a postwar bar on Manhattan's West 48th Street that was one of the major haunts of jazz musicians. For almost every musician I knew, it was a home-away-from-home, restaurant, watering-hole, telephone answering service, informal savings (and loan) bank, and storage place for musical instruments. Many of Jim and Andy's clientele - musicians such as Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and Paul Desmond - are limned here in loving strokes. But this isn't just puffy nostalgia. There are important insights that peer through the reminiscences. In one article, Lees debunks the myth, propagated by such writers as Nat Hentoff, that poor, uneducated black folks invented [jazz] out of inspiration and thin air and that a WASP establishment has ever since kept [them] on the outside looking in. . . Lees disputes this, pointing to over 30,000 jazz bands in the US, to Dave Baker's position as head of jazz studies at Indiana University, to Mary Lou Williams' appointment as artist-in-residence at Duke University, to the large number of honorary doctorates held by jazz musicians. Lees also debunks as elitist the idea that jazz was created by uneducated people. He describes many of the jazz performers as superior musicians who mastered the craft the only way it can be done, by education, formal or otherwise, and hard work. Or, as Harry Sweets Edison put it: Jazz is no folk music. It's too hard to play. Jim and Andy's has long since given way to the glass-and-steel monoliths of Sixth Avenue. But Lees ensures that the great tradition of which he writes will not be so easily forgotten. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

About the Author: Gene Lees, editor and publisher of the respected Jazzletter (P.O. Box 240, Ojai, CA 93024) has written extensively for publications such as Stereo Review and Down Beat, of which he is a former editor. He is also a lyricist whose songs include Quiet Nights on Quiet Stars and Someone to Light Up My Life, and Yesterday I Heard the Rain.

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