The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years’ worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians’ actual words.

Five of the interviewees—Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef—have received the National Endowment for the Arts’ prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people.

The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians’ advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.

Peter C. Zimmerman has been a music writer for more than three decades, interviewing everyone from Waylon Jennings to “Bootsy” Collins, and is author of Tennessee Music: Its People and Places and Podunk: Ramblin’ to America’s Small Places in a Dilapidated Delta 88. He is longtime editor of Odyssey Guides of Hong Kong and lives in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains. Zimmerman can be reached at podunkpete@gmail.com.