The following is an excerpt from Willard Jenkins’ latest book, Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story, which was released in December. The author and sociopolitical commentator Robin D. G. Kelley is currently the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. Formerly a professor at USC and at …
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Nabil Ayers: My Life in the Sunshine: Searching for My Father and Discovering My Family (Viking)
Nabil Ayers didn’t need to write a memoir about what rarely existed between him and his biological father, composer/vibraphonist Roy Ayers, to connect with making music. The general manager of 4AD Records, Ayers founded Sonic Boom Records, co-founded the Control Group, played drums in the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson’s solo ensemble, and has written extensively about …
Jason Miles: The Extraordinary Journey of Jason Miles (Book Writing Cube)
Brooklyn-born keyboardist/producer Jason Miles has charted an impressive recording career that includes credits with Miles Davis, Luther Vandross, and David Sanborn. And it’s all documented in his autobiography, The Extraordinary Journey of Jason Miles. His interactions with these artists and others—an early chapter recounts crossing paths with Michael Brecker at a New York sushi restaurant …
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Joe La Barbera and Charles Levin: Times Remembered: The Final Years of the Bill Evans Trio (University of North Texas Press)
“I’m sorry, but your friend didn’t make it.” And with that, a small group of friends, loved ones, and co-workers knew the death of William John Evans, age 51, September 15, 1980, at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital—less than 27 miles from the pianist’s birthplace in Plainfield, New Jersey. Evans had coughed blood and …
Philip Watson: Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music (Faber)
Funny an Irish-based journalist who’s written about James Joyce’s Ulysses, wounded British soldiers, and Nick Cave is the man making the auspicious title claim of Bill Frisell, the Baltimore-born guitarist tied to jazz but equally respondent to folk, fusion, classical, and whatever Elvis Costello does. And yet the atmospheres that Frisell evokes are nothing but …
Kenny Werner: Becoming the Instrument: Lessons on Self-Mastery from Music to Life (Sweet Lo Press)
Pianist/composer Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery isn’t just a must-read for musicians. A mix of practical wisdom, psychospiritual musings, and cockeyed humor, the influential 1996 book can help any creative expunge “the impurities of your purpose, your playing, and your practicing.” There’s just one problem: Werner feels a key point has been widely misinterpreted—the one right …
Phil Freeman: Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century (zer0)
The great literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote, “True criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.” Case in point: Ugly Beauty. Phil Freeman’s collection of 29 short, sharp essays is true criticism. But his pieces are also real-time dispatches from the front lines of jazz, woven into a memoir. Freeman’s portrayals of musicians are …
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Jackie Kay: Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography (Vintage)
First published in 1997, now republished with a new introduction, Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith unrolls less like a formal study of the singer and much more like a scrapbook-infused diary—starting with Kay, a Black girl adopted into a white Scottish family, and her discovery of an old double album, Bessie Smith: Any Woman’s Blues. It, …
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John Lurie: The History of Bones (Random House)
Like its author, a memoir of John Lurie’s could zig and zag in a dozen directions. There’s the acting career that brought him to the attention of Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch. There’s the fact that Lurie has dryly played himself on two self-created “reality” TV series, and built a provocative career in visual art. …
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Ed & Diane Reed: Double Helix: A Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, and Jazz in Two Voices (ReedsWrite)
Cleveland-born, Bay Area-based jazz vocalist Ed Reed may not have a thousand recording credits to his name. He has, however, lived a life as long and trouble-filled as a dozen Parkers, Gordons and Coltranes combined, coming up as he did wired in Watts while hanging out with Charles Mingus, stuck like glue to serious heroin and …