The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America - REVIEW

by Larry Tye

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.

Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.

William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.

What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod.

Mariner Books
ISBN-13 978-0358380436

Jazz with a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940-1960 - REVIEW

by Tad Richards

Jazz with a Beat is the first book on the often overlooked but vitally important genre of small group swing jazz. Coming into being in the early 1940s, small group swing answered the need in the Black community for a form of jazz that was more accessible (and more danceable) than the new bebop. An adaptation of the big band Black swing (Erskine Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb) of the 1930s to small combos, and with a more vigorous beat for the new generation, this music developed and was beloved through the 1940s, continued to be enjoyed through the rock and roll years of the 1950s, and was a major influence on the soul jazz of the 1960s. Among the many hit artists portrayed in these pages are Illinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Big Jay McNeely, Joe Liggins, Nat "King" Cole, Red Prysock, Ruth Brown, Nellie Lutcher, Camille Howard, T-Bone Walker, and Ray Charles. Dismissed as "rhythm and blues," this music has been ignored by jazz historians. Jazz with a Beat honors this music as a legitimate genre of jazz and is a stirring evocation of an era. It should be of interest to lovers of jazz and Americana.

Tad Richards is a prolific visual artist, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer who has been active for over four decades. He is the author (with Melvin B. Shestack) of The New Country Music Encyclopedia, among many books. He lives in Kingston, New York.

Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press
ISBN-13 978-1438496016

Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp by Travis Atria - REVIEW

Born on the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the after­math of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world. During the legendary Jazz Age in Paris, Briggs's trumpet provided the soundtrack while Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Lost Generation got drunk. By the 1930s, Briggs was considered "the Louis Armstrong of Paris," and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt. Even during the Great Depression, he was secure as "the greatest trumpeter in Europe." He did not, however, heed warnings to leave Paris before it fell to the Nazis, and in 1940, he was arrested and sent to the prison camp at Saint Denis. What happened at that camp, and the role Briggs played in it, is truly unforgettable. 

Better Days Will Come Again, based on groundbreaking research and including unprecedented access to Briggs's oral memoir, is a crucial document of jazz history, a fast-paced epic, and an entirely original tale of survival. 

Travis Atria is the author, with Todd Mayfield, Of Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Billboard, Wax Poetics, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp
by Travis Atria
Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 978-0-914090-10-6

"Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" by Saidiya Hartman - REVIEW

  In WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in northern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the Jazz Age holds an iconic place in America’s collective history, with its flappers and modem girls bobbing their hair, drinking bathtub gin, and dancing furiously in an attempt to shake off the restrictive societal norms holding them hostage, few have attended to the lives of young black women at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, who first challenged and transformed prevailing ideas about love, sex, marriage, and family. In the years leading up to the Jazz Age, young black women in urban New York and Philadelphia were already deeply engaged in their own social revolution.   From the streets of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward to New York's Tenderloin, to the nightclubs of Harlem and the dance stages of Coney Island, and to riots in the streets of New York and at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, young black women "struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free." In WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS, Hartman narrates the story of this radical transformation of black intimate and social life by narrating the stories of several black women, including Edna Thomas, Billie Holiday, and Esther Brown, who, between the years of 1890 and 1935, strove to form lives and relationships unmoored by society's strict standards and rules. Previously believed not to possess the power or social capital to radically influence cultural change, young black women rebelled against the restrictive expectations that society foisted upon them and fought for a greater, more aspirational vision of reality. Put simply, they yearned for a life that anyone else would want-a life of freedom.   Hartman recreates the stories of a rich cast of characters, drawing her materials from journals, surveys and monographs, trial transcripts, photographs, reports of social workers and parole officers, interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists, and prison case files. Among the other women whose stories Hartman tells are:

• Mattie Jackson, a young woman who arrives in New York from Virginia at the age of 15, looking forward to the prospects that the big city can offer her. After relationships with two men who proved to be less than upstanding, a stillbirth, and a baby born out of wedlock, Mattie is caught stealing $3.97 of undergarments from a neighbor. She is sent away to Bedford Hills, where she is tortured and abused by the staff.

• Mabel Hampton, a chorus girl who refuses to labor away in the laundry or the kitchen. She finds freedom on stage in Coney Island and beyond. She creates the life she wants to live through her affairs with other women and by dressing in suits and low heels, unencumbered by society's rules for how a woman was supposed to appear or act.

• May Enoch, who is grabbed by a police officer in plainclothes and whose partner, Arthur Harris, attempts to defend May and ends up killing the officer in self-defense. May and Arthur are put on trial, and the district attorney refers to May as a prostitute, even though there isn't any evidence to support this charge. New York plunges into a race riot that lasts three days.   "The wild idea that animates this book," Hartman writes, "is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise." Seamlessly combining history, deep archival research, and literary imagination, WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS reminds us of these women's radical aspirations and the distance that needs to be cleared in order to reach out and grab hold of that true freedom. How can I live? these women asked. I want to be free. Hold on.

About the Author - Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and she has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor of English at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
by Saidiya Hartman
W.W. Norton, New York
ISBN: 978-0-393-28567-3