Jazz Talking: Profiles, Interviews, And Other Riffs On Jazz Musicians

Max Jones, known affectionately as "the Boswell of bebop" (Time Out), was famed in England for nearly four decades of insightful, ardent writing on jazz. With this luminous collection of interviews, his work will at last be widely accessible to American readers. Here are the voices of jazz -- Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Billie Holiday, and Mary Lou Williams, to name but a few -- in conversation with Jones, who could turn a casual chat into an indelible portrait and who gives American readers a view of these musicians they have never had before.

Max Jones (1920-1993) wrote and broadcast about jazz from 1942 to his death. In the 1940s he co-founded Jazz Music, and he was the principal jazz contributor to the British magazine Melody Maker for forty years.