The Aim Was Song
Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.
Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn’t found the place to blow;
It blew too hard – the aim was song.
And listen – how it ought to go!
He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be –
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song – the wind could see. (Frost)
That’s a poem Robert Frost wrote about poetry, which is music with words. It could as well have been just about music. I love it because it describes perfectly what music is (or what poetry is), a partnership between whatever we humans are and the rest of the universe. Our part in that partnership is to “shape” what we live within into something beautiful. Music shapes time and the force and pitch of the wind through instruments, whether they are just parts of our bodies or extensions of our bodies we’ve invented, into something beautiful.
Nobody could possibly define that word “beautiful.” When black American music first became popular at the beginning of the last century, in the piano music now called “ragtime,” the music Dictators of those days called it “noise,” and said that it was “crude” and “disgusting.” Listening now to ragtime, in the works of Scott Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb, Eubie Blake, and others, you have a hard time imagining how those critics could not have heard the beauty in this music. I try to remind myself of this when I listen to what’s now called music, which I find not beautiful at all. I try, but I don’t succeed.
Rap, Hip-Hop, Metal – all the kinds of sounds most people seem to be listening to these days – seem to me not beautiful for a number of reasons. The second is that they have no variety. Their rhythms are repetitive, their delivery is purposely monotonous. The first is that they seem devoted to celebrating rage and pain rather than love and joy.
I’ve spent a great deal of my life, and of my writing life, working from rage and pain, so I can certainly understand anyone who’s “coming from” there. Robert Frost knew plenty about both those places. He didn’t spend his life turning them into poetry, and I hope I haven’t either, though my wife Lis would probably disagree. (She thinks I’m a “negative” person. She used to be correct.)
When jazz began, it began as music for people to “celebrate” with. “Celebrate” didn’t always mean that you were celebrating something positive. In the early days of jazz in the South, bands would walk along with funeral processions to the graveyard, playing slow, sad marches. When someone dies, the people who knew that someone are saddened and reduced. On the way back from the graveyard, the bands would be playing jazz, music for dancing, music that said, “Well, old man Mose is dead, but you ain’t!” (“Dead Man Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton is an example.) When someone dies, the people left behind just have to go on without that person, no matter how hard it might seem. Jazz is a music made by people who didn’t have the luxury of pretending to themselves that they would never die. The people who created jazz knew they could be dead the next second of their lives, any second. This is true for me, for you, and for everyone you know, but most of us honkies live as if we didn’t know it was true, with rare exceptions.
Jazz is about living all the time in the time that you have. I love all music, but jazz the most, and I hope you all learn to hear it. To hear it, you have to learn to listen to it. That’s why I’m starting out with it.
Louis Armstrong, trumpet, vocal, Jimmy Strong, clarinet, tenor saxophone, Fred Robinson, trombone, Earl Hines, piano, Mancy Carr, banjo, Zutty Singleton, drums : “West End Blues”
The introduction Louis played here is one of the most famous passages in jazz. For the next half century, anybody who played jazz trumpet tried to learn to play it. But nobody who played jazz trumpet could play it the way Louis did, because nobody who played jazz trumpet had the ability that Louis had to pay attention to each part of every note. Any musical tone has three parts, the same three parts any story has: beginning, middle, and end. The musical terms for those three parts are “attack,” “sustain,” and “release.”
If you think about it, there are all kinds of ways to begin a sound – you can slide softly into the first vowel or consonant of a word, or of a tone, or you can strike it as if you were hitting a nail with a hammer, or you can stutter it as if you stuttered. There are all kinds of ways to hold (sustain) a tone, too: you can hold it as close to the original tone as possible, with no variation, or you can use vibratro to vary it evenly until it gets to the end, or you can mix those two approaches. You can end a tone abruptly, or you can let it fade, or you can take it down or up in pitch as it ends. When you think about the way you sound when you’re really speaking from your heart, you’ll know what I mean. You make all these variations in your speech whether you’re aware or not that you’re making them.
Louis, more than any other musician I’ve heard, was aware of every note he played. He paid more attention to those three parts of each note and did more with them than any musician I’ve ever heard. I don’t mean that Louis was necessarily “thinking” about what he was doing. I mean he was listening to himself as he listened to the other musicians he was playing with, paying complete attention continuously. If you listen to this recording often enough, you’ll hear what I mean.
Like just about everyone who ever heard Bix play, Louis Armstrong was knocked out by his music because he heard that same quality of complete attention in it: “And the first time I heard Bix, I said these words to myself: there’s a man as serious about his music as I am. . . . Bix did not let anything at all detract his mind from that cornet and his heart was with it all the time” (Hentoff & Shapiro). Just slightly later than Louis, Bix found himself among musicians who, if not quite his equals in talent, were equally dedicated to excellence, and the recordings he made with them (under various group names) came very close to those Louis made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups:
Bix Beiderbecke, cornet, Frank Trumbauer, c-melody saxophone, Jimmy Dorsey, clarinet&alto saxophone, Bill Rank, trombone, Eddie Lang, guitar, Chauncey Morehouse, drums: “Singing the Blues”
Bix killed himself with booze before he made it to 30. In his remarkable memoir Remembering Bix, Ralph Berton put it another way: “Like Jesus, van Gogh, and other gifted outcasts, Bix found the world uninhabitable, and left it, I think, without regrets, dying as he had lived – casually, without ceremony, and of course broke” (Berton). However his death might be looked at – unforgivable murder of a great talent or tragic premature death of a great musician who found insufficient scope to accommodate his genius – it’s a miracle of history that he came along when it was possible to preserve the beauty of a slight selection of his music.
Innumerable musicians and writers have tried to describe the tone Bix got out of his cornet. I’ve never heard it done successfully. There was an unearthly quality in that tone I’ve never heard anyone else produce from a brass instrument. You could hear him play a bar or two and have no doubt it was Bix playing, and no one else, even though a number of excellent players learned many aspects of his style – Red Nichols and Jimmy McPartland, to name two. As Louis Armstrong remarked after hearing the Whiteman band rending the 1812 Overture, “through all those different effects [cannons, bells, sirens, etc.] that were going on at the ending you could still hear Bix. . . . that pure cornet or trumpet tone will cut through it all. . . ” (Hentoff & Shapiro).
One of the major ideals of jazz has been that you should develop your own sound on whatever ax you’re playing. This makes a real distinction from “classical” music, in which there’s a supposedly ideal sound for each instrument toward which every player of that instrument should aspire. Another of the early greats developed a sound as unique as Bix’s, though on soprano sax and clarinet. Sidney Bechet produced from those two pinching woodwinds walls of sound as wide as barn doors, with a diaphragm vibrato of overwhelming power, all that sound produced without audible effort:
This recording is an excellent illustration of another aspect of jazz, particularly of the earlier jazz now commonly called “New Orleans Jazz”: group improvisation. Louis Armstrong, once again, gave a definitive description of that musical miracle taking place at the Sunset, when Bix would drop by to jam after hours: “those were the things . . . with everyone feeling each other’s note or chord, et cetera . . . and blend with each other instead of trying to cut each other . . . nay, nay, we did not even think of such a mess . . . we tried to see how good we could make music sound which was an inspiration in itself” (Hentoff & Shapiro). The ideal of early jazz was to encourage maximum individuality within a functioning society. It strongly resembled baseball in that respect.
Another unique voice I heard on many of Bix’s finest recordings belonged to Adrian Rollini, who all during the ’20s specialized in bass sax, an instrument so huge that it nearly dwarfed its player. Rollini, a musical prodigy (he debuted at the Waldorf Astoria on piano at age 4), overcame all the physical and technical challenges the instrument presented and produced another unmistakable sound, unmistakable in its fullness and in Rollini’s wonderful manner of driving the rhythm with perfectly placed pick-up notes. His small group work with Bix and with Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang was richly recorded, his work with his own larger bands during the ’30s somewhat less so.
Adrian Rollini, bass saxophone, Irving Goodman, trumpet, Art Drelinger, clarinet/tenor saxophone, Jack Russin, piano, Gwynn Nestor, guitar, George Hnida, bass, Phil Sillman, drums: “Tap Room Swing”
Up until 1957, when CBS aired The Sound of Jazz, I’d listened only to the early, New Orleans style jazz. I was under the influence of Mezz Mezzrow’s book Really the Blues, and Mezzrow rejected any music that diverged from the New Orleans style and instrumentation as bogus. (Such a view was held by more than one jazz critic or musician.) I took Mezzrow’s prejudices as gospel truth, until the Giuffre 3 blew my ears open. I was knocked out by the beauty of Giuffre’s sound on all the reeds he played, and by Jim Hall’s eloquent, lovely, economical guitar, and by the beautifully simple organization of the composition. The Giuffre trio continued, with the great valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer replacing Jim Atlas, and recorded three albums, mostly made up of Giuffre’s compositions, that over sixty years I’ve found fresh and welcome every time I’ve played them. Don’t believe what anyone tells you without checking it against the evidence of your own senses.
Jimmy Giuffre, baritone, tenor saxophones, clarinet, Jim Hall, guitar, Jim Atlas, bass: “The Train and the River”
The Sound of Jazz presented other “modern” jazz, and it was from this show I learned about Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan. I immediately went out and bought the lp they made together that same year, and fell further in love with both of them. A couple of years later, Mulligan recorded another lp with Ben Webster.
Ben Webster, tenor saxophone, Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone, Jimmy Rowles, piano, Leroy Vinnegar, bass, Mel Lewis, drums: “Sunday”
It’s wonderful listening to musicians who’ve experienced so much music separately come together and converse fluently, even if they supposedly speak different musical languages. When you listen to Webster and Mulligan trade places stating the melody of “Sunday” and improvising counter-melodies, they sound as if they’ve played together for years, and you realize there’s really only one language being spoken here – music. As Keith Jarrett once wrote, “Western Society is so hung up on the great god ‘Opinion’ that they are beginning to forget that there is such a thing as Truth. This is a direct parallel to the fact of their being also hung up on ‘Style’ and forgetting that there is such a thing as Music and, whereas something is either True or not, something is either Music or not.” Or, as I’ve often paraphrased it since I read that, “There are two things: music, and not music.”
Introducing his wonderful book Air Guitar, Dave Hickey wrote, “When I was a kid books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of ‘culture.’ . . . I can remember being amazed that whatever city we landed in, my folks could always find these little bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs that no one else knew about. I thought of them as secret places where you could go and meet other people who were part of this secret thing. . . . Everywhere we went there were bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs, where otherwise normal-looking people did all these cool things. And nobody noticed. Nobody knew anything about it! The newspapers didn’t know about it. My scoutmasters didn’t know about it. The television didn’t know about it. My friends didn’t know about it. Even their parents didn’t know about it. . . . That was the best thing about little stores. If you were a nobody like me, and didn’t know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell” (Hickey).
Growing up in a university town on the border of Chicago, I had access to many of the kinds of little stores Hickey pays tribute to, but my greatest “little store” wasn’t a store at all. It was “The Real McCoy,” a jazz show that came on radio station WCFL at midnight, every week night, during my late high school and early college years. The show was the “little store” of Sid McCoy, who was then working not only as a dee-jay but as the producer of any number of superb albums for Vee-Jay records, a small independent record label. One of those albums introduced the quintet led by drummer Walter Perkins, and Sid played the complex-sounding cut “Sleepy” every night for weeks and weeks on his radio show, creating what passed for a “hit” in jazz terms.
Willie Thomas, trumpet, Frank Strozier, alto saxophone, Harold Mabern, piano, Bob Cranshaw, bass, Walter Perkins, drums: “Sleepy”
All these local Chicago musicians might have lived their lives in obscurity and been utterly forgotten by now. Many superb musicians such as Ira Sullivan or Billy Wallace pretty much suffered that fate because they refused to move to New York City, where all the Big Bull recording studios operated.
But Sid McCoy not only recorded them, he had a radio station independent enough (WCFL had been started in the late ’20s by the Chicago Federation of Labor) and interested enough in local talent to allow him to give an 8-minute, multi-time- signature recording by a bunch of then-unknown kids enough air time that listeners could “get it.” And they got it, in sufficient numbers that the MJT+3 was able to make two more wonderful lp’s before the members all went on to careers working with a variety of jazz greats. And I got it, to the extent that every note of “Sleepy” is still embossed in my brain, and listening to it today is like embracing an old love. She still feels and smells the same, and the delight you feel is as fresh as it was in the first embrace.
“The Real McCoy” introduced me to so many musicians I’d never heard of, so much music I might never have listened to, as I drove home after midnight from various Chicago clubs or from “parties” that were nothing but excuses for getting smashed. (I was not a Good Boy.) And through the deep, smoky voice of Sid McCoy I received the message that these musicians and this music were important, even though my parents hated and my teachers and classmates were unaware of them.
But not all my classmates. My dearest friend then and throughout his life, Richard Bohle, lived just down the street we moved to in 1952, and we shared, along with similar senses of humor, a love of music. His father, Friedl (I’m guessing at the spelling), was an engineer who’d fled Germany after the Nazis took control. Friedl loved American jazz, which had been the popular music of the country to which he’d emigrated in the 1930s. Among his albums was an early lp featuring Fats Waller & His Rhythm, which Richard and I fell in love with – particularly with the novelty tunes such as “The Joint Is Jumpin'” and “Your Feets Too Big.”
I think I appreciated the humor Fats injected into the tune (especially his addition to the lyrics, “Your pedal extremities are colossal / To me you look jus’ like a fossil”), and that couplet and “Gun ta gunboats” and “One never knows, do one?” became running tag lines between me and Richard. But I didn’t, then, really appreciate the incredible precision and delicacy of Fats as a pianist, or the individual brilliance and shared sense of swing in his “Rhythm.” It was many years later, after Richard had died, that I rediscovered Fats and came to understand how very great a musician he was. That rediscovery came thanks to another one of those little stores like the ones Dave Hickey praised, a store called Books Unlimited, near the University of Denver.
It was actually a huge used bookstore, with thousands of books of all sorts. The old fellow who ran it with his son had come out to Colorado from New York City many years back, and the store had been there for a long time when I started going to it. After many hours spent browsing around in the place, I realized that I’d been listening to one great Fats Waller tune after another, and that in fact Fats and His Rhythm were all that was ever playing in there. I asked the owner why that was so – “Not that I’m objecting,” I hastened to add.
“Well,” he answered, “I tried a lot of different kinds of music in here over the years. And nobody ever objected to Fats.” I could see why – one tune after another, mostly unknown to me until then, and all suffused with that incredible rhythmic propulsion and joyous spirit that Fats put into everything he ever played.
I resolved to find the source of all those recordings, and discovered that Orin Keepnews and Dan Morgenstern, two jazz critics, had done the work of collecting the entire output of Fats and His Rhythm on RCA’s “race” label Bluebird and getting pristine copies of them onto a series of cd sets. I acquired them all, and they’ve been an unfailing source of energy and happiness in my life ever since.
As was even the memory of Fats’ recordings for the man I called my adopted father, Bill Stickle. Fats goes into a riff on one of his records: “Eef! Eif! Gimme piece-a pie!” and I don’t know how many times I heard Bill repeating that with great gusto as he moved from one room to another in his and his wife Stella’s apartment on Keeney Street, a couple of blocks north of Chicago. I had no idea where he’d gotten the line then, and I was too young and stupid and incurious to ask.
Bill and Stella had already raised their son, Spike, and he was off somewhere in the Marine Corps with his pal, Tim Hillyer. Tim and Louise Longley, who lived in the next apartment building to the West, had had something going until she and I got together, and she brought me into the Stickle’s household, where she was close to being an adopted daughter. She was also the first love of my life, and remains a beloved friend.
Memories from Bill and Stella’s apartment too many and too dear to recount here, but one in particular is associated with the next cut, “Desafinado.” In those days I was still playing tennis every chance I got, and Bill took it upon himself to teach me to play on clay courts, which I’d never done. Every Saturday morning during the brief Chicago summer, we’d head for the beautiful clay courts up on the Northwestern campus, and he’d run me ragged teaching me to hit a cross-court backhand. Then we’d go back to the apartment, where dear Stella would have an immense breakfast of French toast and bacon waiting for us.
I’d always be bringing music over, and that was the summer Stan Getz had come back from a South American tour on which he’d discovered the bossa nova, the Brazilian amalgam of their samba and our jazz, and with Charlie Byrd, a guitarist who’d also fallen in love with bossa nova, produced Jazz Samba, one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. That album became the soundtrack for all those beautiful Saturday mornings at the Stickles’, those lazy Saturday afternoons lying in the sun on the Keeney Street pier, the little waves sparkling and dancing out on Lake Michigan.
Stan Getz, tenor saxophone, Charlie Byrd, guitar, Keter Betts, bass, Buddy Deppenschmidt, Bill Reinchenbach, drums: “Desafinado”
The same year as The Sound of Jazz, Thelonious Monk recorded a concert with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. The recording was buried in the Library of Congress until 2005, when it was issued with great fanfare. I’m in the minority in finding it an example of not music:
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Thelonious Monk, piano, composer, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass, Shadow Wilson, drums: “Blue Monk”
I’ve heard John Coltrane play very beautiful music. By the time he recorded this with Monk, though, he had gotten into a new, more intellectual way of playing, a way that was more interested in the theory of how you got from this chord to that chord than in how you sounded. If you listen to Ben Webster’s solo on “Sunday,” you’ll hear what I mean when I say that Coltrane’s work here leaves me cold. It grows from his thinking about the chords, and not at all from what the tune is about, and not about tailoring his tone to the mood of the piece. Many, many, many people, both jazz musicians and listeners, would disagree with what I’ve just said. Well, let them. Coltrane was a very religious man, searching for God through his music, and he reminds me of Beethoven, who was doing the same, in that I don’t want to listen to his search. I think music is much better when it celebrates what we find walking out our front door every day. An Australian writer named Clive James has similar things to say in his book Cultural Amnesia:
Ellington loved the dancers, and he was appalled by the very thought that jazz might ‘develop’ to the point where they could no longer dance to it. . . . in the early 1940s he had already noticed what was happening to the art-form that he had helped to invent. He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’. . . . His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the twentieth century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute. . . . For Ellington it was a death knell. The art-form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. . . . In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. . . . Thousands of paired examples could be adduced to make the difference audible. A simple case is the contrast between Ben Webster and John Coltrane in their respective heydays. . . . [in the Webster-Blanton Band] Every soloist was encouraged to give it everything he had in a brief space, with no room for cliche or even repetition. . . . From Ben Webster’s recorded works of that period, and especially when he was with Ellington, there was not a bar that I could forget. To remember it was effortless. . . . Now . . . take a couple of decades to regain your breath, and listen to John Coltrane subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder. . . . There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. . . . There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. . . . the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery; supreme mastery of techniques has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can.
Here made manifest was the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative. Coltrane made listening compulsory, and you had to judge him serious because he was nothing else. . . . The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the twentieth century: one after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move which put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. (In architecture, the turning point came with Le Corbusier: laymen who questioned his plans for rebuilding Paris by destroying it were told by other architects that they were incompetent to assess his genius.). . . . Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy.” (James)
I think James goes a little overboard here (“a lesion to the inner ear”), but I agree with him that the direction Coltrane was heading – and plenty of musicians followed him – was the same direction poetry and painting had already taken, becoming ever more inaccessible to normal people. The same direction baseball took, with its market-driven elevation of “superstars” and “tools” and “stuff,” instead of the democratic virtues that won baseball games. Indeed, the whole American “culture” was hurtling toward terminal narcissism and unchecked individualism, and I suppose it’s little wonder that the arts reflected that lamentable direction.
Another great “modern” tenor sax player, Sonny Rollins, recorded with Monk in that same year, and his work on another Monk composition offers a nice contrast with Coltrane’s on “Blue Monk.”
When The Sound of Jazz put Thelonious Monk on national television, he was thought emblematic of the “weirdness” of “modern jazz.” At that time in my life, reputed weirdness was attraction enough for me, but I soon came to hear Monk’s unique harmonic and rhythmic approach as perfectly natural and musical, and I felt more than thought that his compositions nearly all stemmed from the blues and gospel music I was beginning to discover on Chicago radio station WGES. In case I hadn’t figured that out, the date Sonny Rollins made with Monk and Horace Silver in that amazing musical year, 1957, cemented my first impressions:
Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone, Thelonious Monk, piano, composer, Horace Silver, piano, J.J. Johnson, trombone, Paul Chambers, bass, Art Blakey, drums: “Misterioso”
From his entry, Sonny leaves no doubt that this is the blues, and he calls himself back to the blues throughout his solo which, even though it contains startling bursts of sixteenth notes, never sacrifices richness or variation of tone, never feels hurried or desperate, and also contains silences to let the mind take a breath in.
And Monk, for all the quirkiness of his timing, always puts in little reminders of what melody he’s departing from, no matter how far he departs from it, and never forgets to swing, even when he’s doing the craziest damn things with the rhythm.
After the early ’60s, “jazz” fragmented into mutually exclusive camps – “free jazz,” “soul jazz,” “fusion,” (jazz and rock wedded, to the detriment of both) – and most of it became less and less accessible or interesting to people who listened to music for pleasure. So those people quit listening to what they were told was “jazz.” Since the original creators of jazz, with a few token exceptions, had never been recognized for the greatness of their music, they’d mostly been forgotten. Fortunately, by the time that happened in the U.S., jazz had spread to every corner of the world, and generations of musicians had absorbed not only the techniques but the spirit of the original music, and continued to play it to audiences who valued it more highly than any but a few in its country of origin had ever done.
Sometime late in the last century, my friend and colleague Merr Shearn brought me a tape she’d been given by an in-law who lived in Amsterdam. I knew Merr’s musical tastes were sound (we shared a deep admiration for Zoot Sims, among others), so I put the tape in my machine and discovered Paolo Conte. I was doubly floored – by the originality and swing of the music, and by the fact that I’d never heard of its originator.
Many of his compositions are full of the joyous spirit of earlier American jazz, as are his piano and kazoo playing, as are his caressing, raspy vocals:
Paolo Conte, piano, vocal: “Boogie”
I came upon a neglected Rogers and Hammerstein tune, “That’s for Me,” from their musical State Fair, on a Jack Teagarden cd he made with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. I fell in love with the tune and sent a copy of the disc to my friends Dick and Esther Conway. The song reminded me of their untarnished enjoyment of each others’ company. In return, Dick sent me a copy of a cd named for that tune, and I discovered a remarkable collection of Canadian jazz players, completely new to me though they’ve obviously been playing for a long time. I think if you listen carefully to both versions of this tune, you can only conclude that whatever the Great American Culture Mulcher has done to jazz in this country, it’s in good hands outside our borders.
Susie Arioli, vocals, percussion, Jordan Officer, guitar: “That’s for Me”
Radio shows, little stores, jazz clubs, friends. . . . those were the ways jazz came to me and I came to jazz throughout my life. Well, friendship still exists. The corporations haven’t figured out how to eat that, quite yet.
References
Nat Hentoff & Nat Shapiro, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, Rinehart, 1955.
Berton, Ralph, Remembering Bix, Harper&Row, 1974.
Keith Jarrett, liner notes, In the Light, ECM 1033/34ST, 1973.
Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues, Random House,1946.
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar, Art Issues Press,1997.
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, Norton, 2007.
