Jazz Lives - Hardcover

This work presents the results of the author's encounters with dozens of jazz musicians from the United States, Canada, Europe, England, Japan and the Soviet Union over four years. There are high-quality halftones beside the profiles of 100 major jazz acts. Avoiding cliche images of musicians in smoke-filled clubs and cramped studios, the portraits are up-close and personal, catching the artists, as Gene Lees writes, "in private moods, in repose or pensiveness or laughter." These portraits are accompanied by Lees's text - tracing the heady progress of jazz through this century and the promise it holds for the next - with a foreword and afterword outlining some of the larger issues and influences on jazz in its almost 100-year existence. Beginning with trombonist Spiegle Willcox (born 1913) and ending with bassist Chris McBride (born 1972), this book presents the faces and the stories behind the music - the lives who make jazz live. Gene Lees is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for writing in the field of jazz.