The best books about jazz through the stories of jazz musicians

Scabrous, scathing, hilarious, penetrating — all adjectives that can be applied to Miles (1926- 1991) himself, and also to his American Book Award-winning 1990 memoir, which is marked not only by Davis’s profound wisdom about the music he helped revolutionize in the mid 20th Century and his strong opinions about the multitude of jazz figures he encountered in every era from the 1940s to the 80s, but also by the repeated use (sometimes several times per page) of a certain lively, all-purpose twelve-letter expletive. The book’s detractors claim the book is more Quincy Troupe than Miles, but I can attest, having interviewed the great trumpeter at some length in the late 1980s, that Troupe did a masterly job at bringing out the voice and personality of one of jazz’s true immortals.

Gillespie (1917-1993), who was Miles Davis’s idol, was another revolutionary figure in jazz. In the early 1940s, the great trumpeter and the tragic saxophone genius Charlie Parker co-created the new music called bebop — a genre that displaced swing, introducing complex new harmonies and lightning-fast rhythms, controversially changing jazz from the music you danced to, to the music you sat and listened to. Gillespie was a playful and genial spirit who could play his horn higher and faster than anyone, and his memoir, in the form of testimony by numerous musicians who knew and played with him, interspersed with his commentary, is suffused with the Diz’s generous and acute understanding of America’s greatest artform.

Saxophonist, flutist, and jazz educator Dave Liebman (born in 1946) was the son of two Jewish Brooklyn schoolteachers, who envisioned the same life for him — all the more so after he contracted polio at age nine. Much to their dismay, Liebman had different ideas. Because he couldn’t play sports, he nourished a passionate interest in music, first taking piano lessons, then moving on to his real interest, the saxophone. A strong student with an interest in history, he might have followed his parents’ wishes and become a teacher — until the night, at age 16, he took a date to the New York jazz club Birdland and heard the saxophone giant John Coltrane for the first time, and realized the one and only thing he wanted to do with his life.

Written in the form of a dialogue with the jazz writer and musician Lewis Porter, What It Is is not only the story of Liebman’s successful career but a constantly enlightening analysis of the music itself. Lest this sound dry, Liebman tells it all straight from the shoulder, Brooklyn-style, with deep psychological insight about the many players he’s known along the way and an infectious love for jazz.

I’d pair this painfully honest book by an important jazz artist who, like far too many of his peers, happened to be a heroin addict — and also like far too many, died too early — with a similar work, Straight Life, by the saxophonist Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie Pepper; both men did prison time for drug-related offences. Like Miles, Hawes comes alive on the page — but in a kinder and more philosophical way. His addiction is only part of who he is: “Everything you do is important and connected with everything else whether you’re playing piano, harp at St. Peter’s gate, or checkers in the park. The way you get up in the morning, smell the leaves… scratch a dog’s head and say hello to some kids, drive your car, go to the can, feel the sun — that’s where imagination and soul come from.” But with Pepper, everything is colored by his constant wrestle with the Devil: “I was given a gift of being able to endure things, to accept certain things, to be able to accept punishment for things that I did wrong against society…. And I was able to go to prison. I never informed on anyone. As for music, anything I’ve done has been something that I’ve done ‘off the top.’ I’ve never studied, never practiced. I’m one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it.” He reached for it, and found it — and then lost it, too soon.

Crouch (1945-2020) was many things: jazz drummer, poet, philosopher, novelist, biographer, critic. In that last role he was, as the publisher’s notes to this indispensable book of essays on jazz and related matters puts it, “the perennial bull in the china shop of African-American intelligentsia.” Crouch relished controversy — he hated fusion, the popular blend of jazz and rock that came along in the 1970s; he abhorred rap; he even had unkind words to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He was passionately contrarian on racial matters, refusing to hew to any politically correct line. He detested simplistic thinking in any form. Calling Bird, Clint Eastwood’s widely praised 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker “very bad,” Crouch wrote of the “stack of glowing reviews… that reveal the extent to which many who would be sympathetic to Negroes are prone to an unintentional, liberal racism. That racism reduces the complexities of the Afro-American world to a dark, rainy pit in which Negroes sweat, suffer, dance a little, mock each other, make music, and drop-dead, releasing, at last, a burden of torment held at bay only by drugs.” I was privileged to know Crouch a little bit, and can report that talking with him — he listened as well as he spoke — always made me feel smarter. Reading this book will make you feel the same way.