Hentoff covers the big-band and bebop eras with style and grace, providing insights into the lives and work of such greats as Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. Anyone with even a passing interest in jazz music will appreciate this collection of essays (most previously published in the Wall Street Journal) on its luminaries. Aficionados, especially, will value the discographic information included. A "less is more" thread runs throughout the book: Dizzy Gillespie, for instance, says, "It's taken me most of my life to figure out which notes not to play." Hentoff (Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee, 1992, etc.) takes his cue from these efficient, economical musicians. Most essays run two to three pages, but Hentoff finds a key phrase, his own or another's, to nail down an elusive personality. John Coltrane comments, after a set with Thelonious Monk, "I lost my place...and it was like falling down an open elevator shaft." And the author himself writes that alto and soprano saxophonist Johnny Hodges "looked on the bandstand as if he were figuring out his tax returns." Most readers will be surprised to learn that there was a swinging big band composed entirely of women, the Sweethearts of Rhythm, active from 1937 to 1948. And that Bing Crosby — surprisingly hailed by Hentoff as a great jazz singer — opposed the war in Vietnam. Politics figures in other ways as well: There are a few accounts of playing the south during the Jim Crow era. Throughout, Hentoff treats his subjects with great respect. But his outright disdain for "free jazz" and most of its young, living practitioners limits the scope of these essays. The country music section is too brief to do that genre justice. Hentoff combines a fan's passion, a scholar's mind, and a poet's sensibility to illuminate one of the most elusive and distinctly American phenomena-jazz musicians and their music.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0306809826
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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