Living With Jazz: A Reader Edited by Sheldon Meyer

A collection of essays, biographical profiles, and critical analyses by one of the twentieth century's leading jazz writers includes commentary on the work of jazz entertainers, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, as well as assessment of the role of jazz in contemporary culture and its influence on modern music. 20,000 first printing.

Former editor of Metronome, Jazz and Downbeat, Morgenstern has been one of jazz's most passionate observers and chroniclers, particularly during its last major flowerings in the '60s and '70s. Longtime Oxford University Press editor Meyer gathers nearly half a century of Morgenstern's profiles, liner notes, record and show reviews and other musings in this definitive compilation. Morgenstern reminisces about his introduction to jazz in a brief opening memoir, then segues into lengthy sections on his greatest heroes, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Liner notes introduce records by everyone from Ma Rainey to Joe Lovano; essays include a survey of the history of recorded jazz and considerations of jazz's relationship to theater, dance, film and television. Morgenstern has known most of the musicians he discusses, and he depicts them all with insight and affection, from his rollicking account of the career of lovable "Hot Lips" Page to his sensitive portraits of self-effacing Pee Wee Russell and eccentric Lester Young. Often he lets the artists speak for themselves, as when Bill Evans articulates his thoughts on the "intellectual" qualities of his music. Now the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Morgenstern is generous in his assessments of performers and performances, and his exuberant characterizations make this monumental volume a stimulating guide to jazz in the second half of the 20th century.
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Besides writing for and editing jazz journals, Morgenstern has promoted concerts, worked at record companies, and taught and managed jazz education. Rather than a critic--though he is certainly evocative and convincing in his evaluation of music and musicians--he is a contemporary chronicler, a Boswell of jazz. He discovered jazz in his native Austria, and he says in the autobiographical introduction to his massive gathering of articles, reviews, album-liner notes, and other fugitive writings that jazz helped sustain him when, as a child and teenager, he and his mother fled the Nazi Anschluss and spent the war in Scandinavia before reunification with his father in the U.S. Sincerity and generosity of spirit illuminate his personal remarks and carry through to his description of and reflections on the great musicians he has known, worked with, and loved. While there is something good on every page, the pieces on jazz recording and discography constitute an especially valuable part of this lovable book. Ray Olson
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