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MY LIFE IN JAZZ by

MY LIFE IN JAZZ

By

Publisher: Harper & Row

Hot trumpeter Max Kaminsky reminisces about jazz and those who made it from the twenties right on up to the present. There are names aplenty -- Joe Venuti, Eddie Condon, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, etc. Bix (""His tone was so pure, so devoid of any tinge of sentimentality or personal ego, that it was the nearest thing to perfect beauty I have ever heard."") And Billie, whom he describes on her own couch scatting along to Lester Young's choruses, are once again canonized in print. He takes us to New Caledonia with Artie Shaw's Navy Band, to Harlem when it sizzled, to Birdland, the Metropole, along the society circuit, to Town Hall for the first regularly scheduled jazz concerts. Unfortunately, there's lots of jazz and very little life here. Kaminsky has obviously thought of very little else since the time in Brockton, Mass, when he heard Pops over the crystal set. The development is strictly in 7th's; and the interest is primarily for savants, historians, and anecdotalists.