You Can't Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat

Rating:
Summary: An accurate history of great musicians
Review: First- and second-person history as practised by Gene Lees and Nat Hentoff is accurate, human, informative, entertaining and deeply satisfying. It is also a refreshing palliative to the third- and fourth-hand histories that often pass for fact nowadays. To refer to Lees' writings on race as "ranting," as one reviwer has it, with that word's connotation of violence, polarizes the matter and misrepresents the thought and care that have gone into this book's discussion of race. To "skip all that," would be to remain ignorant and in denial of what it took for the four subjects of the book to achieve their status in the pantheon of American artists. Don't skip all that: read the whole thing to learn, from the artists themselves and the people close to them, more about Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton and Nat King Cole and to understand the social environment they lived and worked in.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but nice
Review: This is a fun read, essays on four jazz greats based largely on personal recollections. But there is just too much of the author, a failing in all of Lees' books. We must endure his rantings on race (the man still thinks it's 1955) and politics. Indeed, race is the focus for the book, even at times overshadowing the musicians and jazz. Skip all of that, and there is much to learn and to be enjoyed.

Rating:
Summary: You Can't Steal a Central Idea
Review: Two caveats with this book: (1) It was reviewed in The Economist as being for the general reader, but it really is meant for the jazz aficionado. There is a lot of name-dropping, and lists of albums and songs that might as well have been Sumerian kings. (2) The jacket misleads when it says "the underlying theme in his book is the impact racism had on the four musicians' lives and careers and their determination to overcome it." I agree with the other reviewer who complains that Lees sometimes thinks it's still 1955 (with regard to race)-maybe an effect of his Canadian upbringing-but there's not too much of this. The real problem is that there IS no underlying theme. This book goes all over the place, and I DO mean even within each separate chapter/biography.

But the vignettes of these four great artists' lives in mid-century are often quite memorable anyway. Oral history, biography, music criticism, history of the Prohibition period, anecdotes of racism; cameo appearances by Jackie Gleason, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong; there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Think of it as a magazine with most of the articles running together.