Home :: Books :: Entertainment  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment

Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
Jazz Masters of the Thirties (Macmillan Jazz Masters Series.)

Jazz Masters of the Thirties (Macmillan Jazz Masters Series.)

List Price: $15.00
Your Price: $15.00
Product Info Reviews

Description:

Although he cut his teeth playing trumpet with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, Rex Stewart was best known for his tenure with Duke Ellington--particularly for the sort of delicious half-valving he applied to showpieces like "Boy Meets Horn." But Stewart was a gifted writer, too. He brought an insider's authority to his considerations of Art Tatum, Red Norvo, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Ellington himself (for whom Stewart also functioned as barber and poker companion). And his essays on other musicians often contain flashes of appealing autobiography. Here, for example, he uses his own hero-worshipping impulses as a measure of Louis Armstrong's early impact: "I tried to walk like him, talk like him. I bought shoes and a suit like the Great One wore. I remember a time that a few of us ... thought it would be a good idea to stand under Louis's window and serenade him. This occurred to us in the wee hours after we had emerged from a bar. We had just got started when the cop on the beat discouraged us by saying, 'Get the hell off the streets before I run ya in.'"
© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates