I read some of the actions of jazz musicians in this book to a friend of mine who is a true "jazz buff" (he knew who Serge Chaloff was, for instance: a baritone sax man in Woody Herman's "Herd") and he said: Jazz musicians are like everybody else, only different." That really sums up the many anecdotes throughout generations of jazz musicians as compiled by Bill Crow. The musicians in this book, and surely hundreds of others, are unique in their dedication to what they hear in their heads and how those ideas come out in some fascinating, interesting, and often challenging notes.
For example, when Count Basie complained to one of his side-men, it came out that he could read notes, just not words.
Buddy Rich, so it turned out, was one of the great practical jokers in the jazz field. But, maybe one of the important theses in the book was that segregation and racial prejudice, whatever the outside world had, musicians looked to talent and imagination, not skin color. As one bandleader remarked: "If I had to worry about nonsense like that, I wouldn't have a band. I wouldn't care if the cat was green and had red breath, if he could play" (p.142). The criticism came from outsiders, black friends wondering why a black musician would hire- or even perform with "whitey", and the same was true for white musicians hiring blacks. But, amid all the hi-jinks, there is some underlying pathos. Bessie Smith, a legendary blues singer, died because a hospital would not admit her because she was black, and before she could get to a hospital that treated Negroes,. She was gone. Maybe that is one of the reasons so many black jazzmen went to Europe, where they were accepted purely for their music and talent.
What makes this book truly fascinating is not so much what these famous and not-so-famous musicians say, or even do, but what and who they are: concentrating so much on their music, they often overlook the
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