Gene Lees, author of the highly acclaimed Singers and the Song,
offers, in Meet Me at Jim and Andy's, another tightly integrated
collection of essays about post-War American music. This time he
focuses on major jazz instrumentalists and bandleaders.
Jim and Andy's, on 48th Street just west of Sixth Avenue, was one
of four New York musicians' haunts in the 1960s--the others being
Joe Harbor's Spotlight, Charlie's, and Junior's. "For almost every
musician I knew," Lees writes, " it was] a home-away-from-home,
restaurant, watering hole, telephone answering service, informal
savings (and loan) bank, and storage place for musical
instruments."
In a vivid series of portraits, we meet its clientele, an
unforgettable gallery of individualists who happen to have been
major artists--among them Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman,
Art Farmer, Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond. We
share their laughter and meet their friends, such as the late
actress Judy Holliday, their wives, even their children (as in the
tragic story of Frank Rosolino). We learn about their loves,
loyalties, infidelities, and struggles with fame and, sometimes
alcohol and drug addiction. The magnificent pianist Bill Evans,
describing to Lees his heroin addiction, says, "It's like death and
transfiguration. Every day you wake in pain like death, and then
you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes
all of life in microcosm."
Himself a noted songwriter, Lees writes about these musicians with
vividness and intimacy. Far from being the inarticulate jazz
musicians of legend, they turn out to be eloquent indeed, and the
inventors of a colorful slang that has passed into the American
language.
And of course there was the music. A perceptive critic with
enormous respect for the music he writes about, Lees notes the
importance and special appeal of each artist's work, as in this
comment about Artie Shaw's clarinet: "A fish, it has been said, is
unaware of water, and Shaw's music so permeated the very air that
it was only too easy to overlook just how good a player and how
inventive and significant an improviser he was."
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