23: Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff

Hear Me Talkin' to Ya is a very interesting, heavily edited, oral history of jazz. The book is entirely composed of short—a sentence to a few pages—statements by noted jazz musicians (and producers and the like), collected at the beginning of the 1950's. Though lacking a unified narrating voice, the whole flows remarkably well. Dates are sometimes muddled, or not mentioned at all, but this is not meant to be a thorough history of jazz. It's beautiful source material for one.

Buster Bailey on "swing" (this would have happened somewhere around 1925):

When I came into New York I was asking Louis [Armstrong] one night about the different guys in the Fletcher Henderson band. He told me about Big Charlie Green and about a tenor saxophone player—Hawkins—he said that guy really swings. That was the first time I had heard the word used that way, and I didn't dig what he meant. Louis tried to explain it. He said, "Man, he swings! He swings out of this world!" I caught on to what he meant, because after I got to work that night I heard Hawkins. So I knew what he meant. How would I define it now? Swing. A guy that's... I still have to use the word swing. I mean a guy who's got a beat—a certain accent—a certain attack. Part of it is that you are playing along with the beat.

A hilarious account given by Duke Ellington of meeting Sonny Greer and "checking him out":

Then someone sent for Sonny Greer from New York. We had heard about Sonny. He was supposed to be a very fly drummer, and anybody from New York had the edge on all of us. But maybe, we thought, he wasn't all that he was cracked up to be. We watched him work in the pit, and he used a lot of tricks. He was flashy, but our minds weren't made up. We decided to give him the works and find out just what sort of a guy he was, maybe he hadn't done any more than just pass through New York. We stood on the street corner and waited for him. Everybody used to stand on street corners then and try to look big-time. Here comes Sonny. "Whatcha say?" we ask him. I take the lead in the conversation because I'm sure that I'm a killer in my new shepherd plaid suit, bought on time. Sonny comes back with a line of jive that lays us low. We decide he's O.K.