The occasion of our 1994 meeting was a gig of saxophonist Leigh Pilzer’s She Bop combo. My then twelve-year-old son Neale was with me. Apparently one of the musicians pointed me out to Sheryl and she came over to my table and handed me a copy of her first CD, Little Misunderstood, saying, “This is for you.” I had been hearing of her from D.C. drummer the late Louie Bellucci, who told me that he had caught a young Baltimore guitarist at the One Step Down and was very impressed. Her contributions to the evening’s program that Neale and I caught in 1994 verified Louie’s very positive assessment.

In the decade-and-a-half since, Sheryl Bailey has proved to be a major guitar voice in jazz (and other genres), taking third place in the 1995 Thelonious Monk Guitar Competition (she was the competition’s first female instrumentalist finalist) and releasing six CDs and a DVD under her own name. In addition to her active performance schedule, Sheryl has for the past decade been an associate professor of guitar at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, from which she had graduated. She has been a clinician and artist in residence at a number of other institutions and has authored two guitar instruction books. She crosses musical boundaries, working in jazz, blues, rock, Afro-pop, klezmer, hip-hop, and pop and has toured here and abroad with Richard Bona, Klezmer Madness, Jazz Guitars Play Jimi Hendrix, Jack Wilkins, and her own combos.

Sheryl’s most recent CD, A New Promise (Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild), has her leading a 16-member band, the Three Rivers Orchestra. The album’s title tune, penned by Cheryl, is in memory of guitarist Emily Remler, who died in 1990 at the age of thirty-two. Three of Remler’s compositions are included on the CD. The label’s publicity release has Sheryl giving expression to the impact that Remler had on her.

“She paved the way for me,” says Sheryl. “I really felt her pain and her struggle with where she was at that time [the 1980s] being a woman player. I really wanted to hear Emily’s person in me when I played. It meant a lot to me to do this tribute and pay homage to her and to say thank you.”

Detailed information about Sheryl Bailey can be found at www.sherylbailey.com and www.myspace.com/sherylbailey3.

I audio and video taped an interview with Sheryl in my former home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on February 26, 2005. I began by asking her to tell me where and when she was born and about her family background.

“ I was born in 1966,” Sheryl began, “outside of Pittsburgh and actually was born to a family of musicians. My grandmother and my great grandmother were music teachers. My grandmother had a doctorate from Columbia, which for women at that time was unheard of. And my mother also played piano wonderfully, with fantastic, incredible technique, and she was very humble about it. She didn’t pursue being a professional musician. But many times she did play church organ and things like that. She was a single parent. So that was a good part of growing up. We all had to take piano lessons. The music around the house was either my mother playing or my sisters playing — classical, Chopin, Beethoven, and also show tunes, arrangements, sort of stock, you know, books of pop music arrangements and stuff. My sisters were into the Beatles then. There was a big age gap between us. And my mother liked a lot of the crooners at the time, Andy Williams, whatever, those kinds of singers, so that music was there, too.”

“How early did you become aware of this music in the household.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I always thought it was what everybody did. We grew up in a rural area and there wasn’t a lot of culture there so I just assumed that everybody played. We would sing show tunes and all my sisters were always involved with musicals, musical theatre. My mother would also play. There’s a picture of me when I’m very small, it was in the local paper. I would just get up on the piano and improvise, just play sounds for hours, story sounds, you know, like children will do. Anyhow I guess I’d been at a women’s club meeting with my mother and got bored and got on the piano and just started off one of my fantasies, and so at a very young age I was playing keyboard, and interested in being creative with music. I was probably about three. I didn’t take lessons until later, but at that point it was just story telling for me, I would spend hours just getting lost in my fantasy world of sounds.

“What was the age gap with your siblings and what are the names of your family members?”

“My grandmother is Dr. Sally Tobin Dietrich and she passed away not too long ago. She lived into her nineties. My mother, Sally Bailey, recently had a stroke, so she can’t play the piano anymore. Sally is my oldest sister, eleven years older. Susie is just under her, and played great, still plays a little bit, and my brother John. I’m the youngest. So I grew up with this music around. My brother is a cartoonist now, Susie is a graphic artist, and Sally is a drama therapist. She runs the drama therapy department at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. So we’re all involved in the arts, and that’s just what I thought you do. And it wasn’t even that this was a career, it was what you do. I thought when I was a little girl, what am I going to do when I grow up and I would say, an artist or a great poet. I thought that’s the kind of stuff you did. I didn’t think about, I’ll be a doctor and make lots of money, or whatever, it was just the natural happening.

“ I don’t think I started piano lessons until I was in fifth grade, but in second grade — this is the weirdest thing I ever heard of — they gave us this sort of test, they were always giving aptitude tests back then, in the ’70s. And the results came back, and they said that I couldn’t be in the band because I didn’t pass this test. I was devastated, I was angry, I was just, ‘What are you talking about?’ So I had to talk to the music teacher and, like, you know, ‘I can do this.’ So because of that I actually was always a first chair, I took up the trumpet. I was so determined at five, I was, like, how dare you tell me I’m not gonna play music? It was actually a challenge to me, to show them. You weren’t gonna let me in the band, and then you let me in the band, I’m gonna be the first chair. So that gave me the drive to be that. I took a lot of pride in that throughout school. It was just standard band music. I would practice that stuff and then I would learn stuff from records, too, melodies and things. We had Herb Alpert records. So I spent a lot of time just playing the trumpet, outside of what you had to do for band.

“I would try to learn songs and play all the high melodies. I was doing it all by ear. I knew how to read music, better then than I can now. I played trumpet all the way up into high school. My interest in it dropped off when I started playing guitar. So I really got into guitar and then I just kind of kept my trumpet playing together to stay in the band. To be honest, I wasn’t the best piano student because the things I liked to practice were the minor key stuff, you know, Russian composers and stuff. I wasn’t a great student. I’m sure my piano teachers were shocked. I can’t remember my piano teacher. My band teacher, when I said I’ll prove to you that I can be that, was Frank Zimmaro, and he was a great influence to me as a kid, and he was in the music program at my school up until the time I graduated high school. He was always a very positive force, and was always very supportive of me.

“When I was thirteen, I wanted to play guitar. I remember being somewhere, on summer vacation, maybe Long Island. Maybe there was an outdoor concert. I remember just being fascinated by the guitar, and playing the guitar just got in my fantasy world, and I was into rock music. Maybe in some ways, too, having all these great pianists in the house, it was maybe a way to assert my identity, too, and get attention that way. But I think that it’s a common thing, kids fantasize about being a rock star, and that was the instrument that was associated with all the music that I loved, so I think I had these sorts of dreams in my mind, about playing the guitar, and I daydreamed, drew pictures of guitars all the time. So eventually I begged my mother to get me an electric guitar.”

By the end of the 1970s, when she was entering her teens, Sheryl had been listening to rock music for three years or so.

“I used to hang out with my brother John,” Sheryl continued. “We lived on a farm, so me and my brother were very close, we would hang out with friends, listen to all the rock bands. Deep Purple, Humble Pie, the Beatles, all those bands. Uriah Heep and all those kind of hard-rock bands, and so I thought John was the coolest guy. I loved this guitarist Peter Frampton, ’cause at the time he had this record Frampton Comes Alive, and back then on the rock records, the bands would improvise. One side of an album was a song — they don’t do that anymore. He was into this thing called the talk box and he would make his guitar talk, and I just loved that, I would listen to that, and it was my favorite record, and I thought that would be my dream, to be a guitarist like that. I don’t even know how it works. I would love to get one. You sing through it and it’s connected to the pickups of the guitar, so you can actually do vowel sounds to the notes that you play. It sort of shapes the notes as they come out. So you can actually sort of sing and it’s a voice that’s coming through the guitar, it’s really cool.

“So then I kind of followed up and got into other bands. I guess by the time I got my guitar, I was into all that music and Cream, which is Eric Clapton’s group. And, really, all these bands are blues guitar, they were copies of blues guitarists. So, really, what I was absorbing was Jimmy Hendricks, blues guitar, the history of blues guitar. That’s really what that language is of that style of playing, blues guitar.

“That’s the stuff we liked to listen to. And my brother was in a way sort of pivotal in getting me into jazz. He was sixteen or seventeen, and all of a sudden he came home one day and said, ‘I’m into fusion now.” And I was, like, ‘That sounds so cool! I have to get into that too.’ His fusion was a Stanley Clarke record, School Days and Al Di Meola’s Electric Rendezvous and “Just the Two of Us” [a song on the 1981 album Winelight] by Grover Washington Jr. He was into Frank Zappa, too. So he would go out and I’d sneak into his room and listen to his fusion records, and that got me curious about jazz.

“A kid up the street showed me how to play the basics. It’s a boogie woogie pattern, same old one from way back, but all rock songs use that basic pattern. So, as soon as I figured it out, I thought, ‘Oh, I can figure out all my favorite songs,’ and none of them were that harmonically complex, they always use that type of rhythm. So once he showed me how to do that, I remember just playing it for more than six hours one day, my hands hurt, I just had to break, open up my hand. But once I figured that out, yeah, I just taught myself everything. I remember reading in a book, too, or some guitar player magazine, about how you put a rock on top of your records to slow the turntable down and get stuff. So I would burn out the belt on the turntable! So I learned these little things that I needed to do.

“And then there were a couple of guys that really imitated Hendrix, I loved them too. British guitarist Robin Trower and Frank Marino, a Canadian guitarist. And I would learn all of their stuff. Then I got really into heavy metal, sort of like the next thing, because I was just playing the guitar all day, that’s all I was doing, all day. Then I started playing in bands, on my own, rock bands, so I got into that, and that was like the next challenge. At that time Van Halen was very big, so I would learn those solos. Then I would call up my friends and say, ‘Hey, check this out,’ and put the phone [next to the speaker]. So I was on that course, and I can understand why kids, if they have this serious direction, get into heavy metal, because those guys, virtuoso guitarists in that style, those guys are doing Paganini stuff. They’re masters of the guitar. So it’s sort of a natural progression, these days, for kids in guitar, if they’re serious, they get into the basic rock stuff, and then they get into heavy metal stuff cause it’s sort of the next challenge. Luckily, then I did a u-turn and got into jazz, so I put all that energy into studying the music which is jazz.”

“What was your first guitar? I ask Sheryl.”

“Well, I was the youngest, so I was expert at getting what I wanted,” she says, laughing. “But I had to pull out all the stops on this one. The first guitar I begged my mother for was from the J.C. Penney catalogue. There was a strap, a Harmony strap, and a cube amp, maybe a Harmony amp, and that was my very first guitar. I remember hearing her talking to a friend on the phone: ‘I’m gonna break down and buy her this guitar. I know it’s gonna sit in the closet and get cobwebs in six months.’ In a way, it was sort of like when I was a little kid and they said, ‘You can’t play in the band,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m gonna be first chair.’ Just overhearing that conversation I was, like, ‘No way!’ As soon as I got it, that was it!”

“Tell me about the garage band.”

“I would find some kids in school that played, there was a kid up the street who played drums, and most of the time I would show them how everything went, and I would sing too. So we would do all the rock songs, all that hard rock.”

“Mostly boys?”

“Yes, they were always boys.”

“How did they respond to a girl playing?

“I don’t know, I never was aware of it.”

“You were never aware of anything.”

“No, ’cause I was the best player,” she says, laughing.

“So you said you made a u-turn into jazz. Tell me about that and whom you were listening to, who influenced you and so forth.”

“Sort of about the time when my brother announced that he was into fusion, around that time I also discovered a radio station, WYEP, public access, and I remember I was just amazed by all the music. They had a wide range, they would play World Music, Latin music, but the jazz is what I was so fascinated by, it sounded so exotic, I used to love it. If I could understand that, that would be amazing. But also it really moved me in a way, but I didn’t have words for it. I felt really connected to it, and I was growing up in this farm town, I was always an outsider. You know, the kids at school, I didn’t really identify with. But hearing jazz made me feel connected to something really meaningful and something much bigger. So I was drawn, and just about this time too, I wasn’t doing well at school, cause I would not go to school, I stayed at home and played guitar all day. My mother was really upset with me, and I said, ‘Why do I have to go to school? I want to be a musician!’ She said, ‘If you’re going to be a musician, you should study.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ So she called Duquesne University and found a jazz guitar teacher, John Maione. All these things were sort of around the same time. So I started taking lessons with him. He would make me recordings of Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Jimmy Raney, Kenny Burrell — and that was it, that was my new obsession, that was my world, my lesson every Saturday. First stuff we would do was a lot of chord solos, arrangements, and then a lot of things, very early players, Carl Cress, Eddie Lang, we would do Django Reinhardt solos, Joe Pass solos, Charlie Christian solos. He gave me a really great foundation of all the early players.”

“So you’re at what point now, well into high school?”

“Yes, about 15. Actually, recently I was back at our house and I found this list on the wall, my practice schedule. I should have saved it. I got a kick out of seeing it. At that point I was really into heavy metal. I had to divide my time up. I had practice schedules, six hours a day I would practice. At least three hours I would dedicate to heavy metal, at least three hours to jazz. Then, eventually, I was just playing jazz all the time. And of course today I’m full circle.”

“At some point,” I observe, “it must have then gone beyond the garage band, to some kind of playing in the community, or outside of your garage, or something.”

“Well I think John Maione was great in that. The music studio where he taught, he would have recitals and competitions and stuff, so finally, my garage band played at school for a talent show. So John got me involved in recitals and performances through the music studio and then also he got me involved at Duquesne University, where they had summer jazz programs, and that was like the best time of my life, in my teenage years, going to jazz camp in summer, getting a chance to play, and really play with kids, and jam sessions. John was very encouraging. They had brought Tal Farlow to Dusquesne. He was the first actual real jazz guitarist I ever saw, and I’ll never forget that incredible time. In Pittsburgh there’s a guy named Joe Negri. Pittsburgh is a quirky town. He was also on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. He was a fantastic guitarist, like a Johnny Smith type guitarist, and he was also a legend in Pittsburgh. He was like a TV personality, one of the people on the local news channel, everyone in Pittsburgh of a certain age knows Joe Negri. ‘That sounds like something Joe Negri would play’, it’s a funny, very cool thing. So Joe was involved there at Duquesne. So they brought Tal Farlow in, and that was just indescribably incredible at that time. And also later on they brought in Joe Pass, so I had an opportunity to see a lot of these players. And talk to Joe himself. So my goal then by eleventh grade was to go to Duquesne and to study with Joe Negri, and be involved in the great jazz program there.”

“That’s what you did?”

“That’s what I did.”

“For how long?”

“I was there a year, I had a friend there, and I was sort of the young whatever, hot kid there, so I got a lot of opportunities to play with the big band and other ensembles, and studied with [saxophonist] Eric Kloss there. He was a great influence.”

“Wow!” I interrupt. “I interviewed him twenty or so years ago on my radio show. He has resurfaced. I’m sure he’s been playing all this time. He was written up recently in Down Beat and Jazz Times.”

“He’s had a hard life, for sure. And he was back in Pittsburgh. I guess he’d been in New York and it wasn’t working out. But there was a great opportunity for me to be in his ensemble at Duquesne. So anyway, my friend, Pat Hunt he was a guitarist and a senior there, he got me psyched to go to Berklee. I don’t know if he’s playing now anymore, but he was like number one guy, I was number two. He and I were, like, the hot guitarists. He was a good friend and he was just looking out for me. He said, ‘You know what, Sheryl, this place is too small for you, you gotta get outta Pittsburgh, you gotta do this. So I took his advice and went to Berklee.”

“Up to this point, were you doing any playing outside the educational context?”

“I would do some little gigs, but I really felt at that point like I was a student. I mean, I was doing a lot of things at school, and sessions, but I wasn’t really gigging, and I still felt like I had a lot to learn. Did occasional gigs, yeah, like at the campus bar.”

“So you stayed at Duquesne for a year, then went on to Berklee?”

“ Yes.”

“Tell me about that, what it was like being in the big city?”

“It was kind of a shock, for sure,” she says, laughing.

“How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm . . . ?”

“Yes,” she concurs, laughing again. “Well, I made a good friend who taught me, he was a Bostonian, actually, a city person, he told me. You know, I would walk out in my overalls, fresh off the farm.”

“Like Louis Armstrong arriving in Chicago with his big boots on.”

“I loved Berklee. For me, at that time, it was so much knowledge, which is what I wanted. I just wanted to understand harmony, and they had the most incredible, and I still think, most incredible approach to teaching harmony. So for me it was an amazing time. I had Ed Tommasi, a class called Harmonic Considerations. I still have that black book for it, it’s like the bible. I would never miss that class. At a certain point at Berklee I didn’t go to many classes except his class and my private lesson. I studied with Bruce Arnold, who taught me a lot of the Charlie Banacos approach, in ear training. Bret Willlmott, voicings and polyrhythms. Jon Damian, who’s just more sort of abstract concepts of improvising, playing lines. Hal Crook had started there, who’s an incredible teacher, just teaching concepts for how to improvise, how to practice improvising, set goals for yourself, and all this. So, I teach there now and I’m still always humbled that I’m on the faculty with them, because everything I know, really, even as a teacher, comes from them, from their way to just deliver information so clearly. And that’s what I wanted, everything I wanted at that time. So all I did at Berklee was, I mean, if I practiced six hours a day when I was in high school, I would put in ten hours a day transcribing solos. That was a great time.”

“Who were some of your classmates?”

“Well I was there with some people that are famous today, but I can’t say that I knew them. Branford Marsalis was there, and there were a lot of people there, but I was still kind of really backwards, and I wasn’t really sociable, I was just really into practicing. So I think, if I could do it again, you know, having grown up quite a bit, and just being more grounded with myself, I probably would have had a better time socially, but for me I was just there to get this information and practice, so I was sort of a hermit in a lot of ways.”

“Did you get out to some of the places in Boston and Cambridge?”

“Yeah, there was a place that closed called the 1369 Jazz Club. I used to go there and see Dave Liebman, and saw Kenny Burrell there, and Bill Frisell. That was a great club. And Ryles. Then there was lots of stuff on campus that was always happening, music happening all the time. Then towards maybe my last year there I started playing in the house band at Wally’s Café, which was still going when I was there, and they had music — it was just like a little dive — and a house band. Antonio Hart was in the band then, the last summer before I left Boston.”

“I can’t think of the names now,” I say “but Claire Daly, who was there probably two years before you, told me about some of the places that she used to go to, and in fact she tended bar at one of them.”

“Yeah, Michael’s. Oh, then the Willow Jazz Club was there, and actually my first official jazz gig as a leader was there, with [saxophonist] Matt Otto, Matt Wilson on drums, and Mark Turner, bass player, still up there. Yeah, I had, like, a weekend there. First time I went out as the Sheryl Bailey Quartet. At that time I was gigging around town, doing trio gigs and playing in the house band at Wally’s.”

“And you were about twenty?”

“Yeah.”

“How long did you stay at Berklee?”

“I finished there, mainly because my mother wanted me to get a degree, and she was right, because now I have a degree and I teach there. So I did finish there in three years, and I stuck around Boston maybe six months. Then some friends from this area [D.C./Baltimore] that I knew from there were starting a band. They called it Afro Funk Band. So I didn’t know where I was going then with my life, so I moved down here because of that. Drummer named Anne Herson, who’s in New York now. Steve Berson was the bass player. It was their band. They were all good players. We did original music, and then we did covers of Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade tunes or just tunes that we liked — maybe we would do a Led Zeppelin — and we wrote a lot of the music and it really was based out of that style of music, Afro Pop and Reggae. So that’s how I ended up in Baltimore.”

“So tell me about the scene in Baltimore.”

“Well, when I came to Baltimore I just went out and started booking my own gigs and also to just meet the players there. Eventually I met [pianist] George Colligan and [trumpeter] Alex Norris and I just kind of made things happen for myself so people could get to know me and I get to know them. Then I just started freelancing as well as doing gigs booked under my name as a leader. It’s funny, I kind of just went to work. I started teaching at Towson University in maybe ’92.
I used to play in the house band at the Haven and I played a lot there over the years. It’s a little dive, but it’s still going, it’s like the jazz club [in Baltimore]. There were other places that would open up and close down. I started working with this drummer, Larry Bright, who was, like, a fusion drummer, and [bassist] Gary Grainger. We would do drum festivals and drum clinics and stuff. It was just this all out, just this crazy power trio. And in a way this is sort of me coming full circle into my rock playing, fusing that with the jazz playing. A lot of the players were really curious about how I played, ’cause I didn’t approach it like a rock player, per se, but I had technique from playing that kind of music. Really, I was approaching everything from a bebop perspective, playing over that kind of music. So a lot of the players were really curious about how I was playing, what I was playing. I was playing Bird, but with electric guitar, with distortion, or digital delay, wawa pedal, whatever, to make that sort of guitar sound, but the phrasing and content of my lines are all coming out of bebop. So people were curious about what I was doing. ‘Just get an Omni book! [I.e., Charlie Parker Omnibook: For C Instruments (Treble Clef)] It’s all in there!’” she says she told them, laughing.

“One aspect that you kind of glided past since your high school years,” I remark, “is who were you listening to? You mentioned some people you saw in person, or that you heard on records, Kenny Burell and some others. These years that you went through Berklee, what were you doing in terms of buying records and listening to them. You mentioned Bird, of course. You must have gone back and kind of done some self-education.”

“Well in a way, like I said, my first teacher, we really did a lot of early stuff, Carl Kress and Charlie Christian, but when I was at Berklee the hot players there were Mike Stern, John Abercrombie, and John Scofield. They still are to the kids there now. That’s really who I was into. And really, for me, when I look at it, when I came out of Berklee, I was just such a typical product from Berklee, and those were the players I was into. It wasn’t until I was in New York that I really dug in and went backwards again, back into the old players, and I have in recent years more so. When I was in Baltimore, I was more of a modern, kind of fusion player, played straight ahead, but my concept was coming out of those players that were happening in the ’80s, even though I loved Wes [Montgomery] and I transcribed tons of Wes solos, and Sonny Stitt and Bird solos, for sure. I guess, as a guitarist, the style I was playing in was more of this modern jazz guitar style. Now, actually, I’m probably going further back to grab out of players like Grant Green, and older Pat Martino. At that time I was way into Mike Stern and John Abercrombie. My first record, which I did in Baltimore, was a very Mike Stern, Scofield sounding record.”

“So you were in Baltimore for a couple, three years?”

“I was there five years, ’90 to ’95.”

“Mention some of the people you played with.”

“One gig I did for a while at that time, a high profile gig, was with [saxophonist] Gary Thomas. And that happened when I was still pretty fresh, in ’92. I did a couple of tours with him, [pianist] Tim Murphy, [bassist] Ed Howard, and [drummer] Adrian Green. Adrian plays drums on my first record Little Misunderstood.”

“Where did you tour?”

“We did Japan, and then we did some shows in D.C., Philadelphia, stuff like that. I think when his record The Kold Kage came out I was replacing Paul Bollenbach. So I worked with him a bit in ’92, ’93, ’94. And I also worked with [pianist] Stef Scaggiari over in Annapolis, and really all the guys here in D.C, a lot of great players, [bassist] Paul Langosch, [Saxophonist] Ron Holloway, I used to work with him. And [drummer] Harold Summey and [saxophonist] Fred Foss. I worked in Harold’s band a long time, particularly around the time when he was doing the Monk competition, we had a regular gig. That was a great band, a great opportunity. Couple years, definitely, like ’93, ’94. Then in Baltimore with Greg Hatza, I used to do his organ trio a lot, at the Haven or concerts.”

“Did you ever play with trumpeter Allen Houser?”

“Yes, I worked in his band for years at Bertha’s [in Baltimore].”

“Yes, I thought you did. I know he was trying to reach you after you got up to New York, and I had your number.”

“Yeah, he did, he sent me a copy of his record. Yeah, it was good to hear from him. I loved the repertoire he used. He did a lot of not the typical stuff that everyone else uses. It was great. Yeah, I did that gig for quite a number of years.”

“Okay, tell me about the beginnings of your New York time, which has been for the last ten years.” [the interview was taped in 2005]

“Yeah, ten years.”

“When did you move to New York?”

“Officially, in ’96. I was in both cities for a while. I was teaching at Towson University down here and going up to New York. I would rent a couch from somebody and I was working with a band that had a lot of club dates and stuff, so it paid well for me to go up there. Then I’d go out and hang out and start picking up gigs and before you knew it, instead of a weekend, I’d be there all week, then two weeks. Then I had enough work that I felt like, ‘Oh I can move up here and do this.’

“Well as I said, I spent a year making the transition. I had a band that did a lot of club dates, so when I moved there I was making a lot of money but was kind of going mad just doing silly music. So I rented a rehearsal space where I would just have sessions almost every day of the week.”

“Who were some of the musicians you were coming into contact with during this process of beginning to network and get into the scene there?”

“Wow, there’s so many. I mean, that’s the thing about New York. There are so many fantastic players that it’s just such a great experience being around all these players. In particular, there was a really good friend, [bassist] Ashley Turner. My second record that I did was with him and we were really good friends and neighbors and we played all the time together and did gigs together. And his friend [saxophonist] Roger Manning, is from New Zealand. So we played together a lot. Wow, there were so many players! [Drummer] Sylvia Cuenca. I can’t think of all the names. If I would just meet somebody at a session I’d say, ‘Hey let’s play tomorrow.’ I’d just make a list of players. [Pianist] Sarah Jane Cion and I used to play quite a bit when I got into town.”

“Were you getting out to the clubs?”

“Yeah. Every night. Smalls, and I was at the Zinc Bar a lot. That was my favorite place ’cause they always had guitar players. I was gigging, too, all the time.”

“Where were your gigs?”

“There was a place, First on First, where we used to play trio gigs. There was a place around the corner, La Linea. Dharma. Wow, where else did we play? Those were our main places when I first got there and we were playing a lot. And Augie’s Jazz was happening then. I started playing with Dwayne Burno, bass player, in his band, which was a really great opportunity, with [saxophonist] Myron Walden, and [drummer] Jeff Ballard played quite a few times. And [drummer] Joe Farnsworth, we played Smalls, we played at Birdland. That was, like, my first couple of years in New York.”

“Now, you said that you started to go back in time in terms of listening?”

“Well, I think there’s something about drummers in New York. There’s great drummers all over the place, but there’s something about the drummers in New York. And the time. And I think, for myself, to really just dig into the feeling of swing and the feeling of jazz, I realized that I had all this knowledge and technique and all this stuff, but I really wasn’t as in touch as I could have been with the soul and the spirit of the music. Just being in New York, you could go down to Smalls and sit in with [drummer] Jimmy Lovelace, or [pianist] Harold Mabern, and you played with these guys that are the history of the music, and it’s such a bigger thing than you could imagine. So I think that experience just made me really go back and listen to a lot of Grant Green, a lot of Wes, Tal Farlow, and just really dig in, and also, Jack Wilkins is another guitar legend. We’ve become really good friends in the last few years. And just being humbled by, like, wow, how much I don’t know and how I needed to completely open my mind and start from square one, that’s what I felt like. And I still feel that way. I think being in New York makes you feel like that, like I’m just a speck, that I don’t know anything and I’ll just open my mind and learn whatever I can. I think mainly because when I was in Baltimore I was a big fish in a small pond and I knew that, and that’s why I had to leave. You know, these great players, just for myself, that’s what I needed to do to grow. I needed that feeling of that openness and inspiration of just being around some of the great players, and older players, to be around that history.”

“Going back into the history and listening, you mentioned mostly guitarists. Who were some of the others you listened to, on horns and piano and so forth?”

“Definitely, Horace Silver is one of my favorites as a composer and just his whole concept of the blues, and his comping. Monk, as composer and a player. I just adore his writing. Kenny Dorham, trumpet player, I love. I always loved Cannonball [Adderley]. I think the style of playing and writing that I’m most attracted to is probably that late ’60s and mid ’60s Hank Mobley, love all those records, and the feeling of those records of that time, that had the biggest impact. Chick Corea, but more from the early’ 70s late ’60s Corea, the feeling of that music is what inspires me. I always listened to Bird since I first got into jazz.”

“Did you go earlier than Bird? Did you get back into the Swing Era?”

“I have, only recently. I did a State Department tour. Well, I’d done the one on Ellington, for which I really studied the repertoire and stuff. But the next one we did was Louis Armstrong, and I had never really checked that out. So what we’d done for the project was to transcribe some of the solos and harmonize them and use them as points of improvisation, and that was an incredible experience, because I’d never really checked it out. You know, you hear it, but didn’t ever really play it or play along with a record. That was a really great experience.”

“What period?”

“Well we picked stuff from all different periods, but we did ‘Potato Head Blues’ and a couple of tunes like that. I became a fan,” she says, laughing, “from that experience. So, yeah, but there’s so much more, though, I need to dig into. I learn a lot from an artist that I work with, David Krakauer. I would consider him an expert person of that era, or maybe not that era but probably Lester Young, and he’s really into Johnny Hodges and Count Basie, so he turns me onto records all the time when we’re on the road. So it’s sort of like a new thing that I’m getting through just listening, going backwards.”

“Don’t neglect Artie Shaw.”

“Okay, I won’t neglect Artie Shaw.”

“And his Gramercy Five, a wonderful group. The first version of it had Johnny Guarnieri on harpsichord, Billy Butterfield on trumpet, and electric guitarist Al Hendrickson. That was in the 1940s. In 1954 he put down his clarinet and never picked it up again. Now, did you go in the other direction? You mentioned people up through the late ’60s, and you mentioned some people like Hank Mobley. There are other people in the’60s, how about Trane?”

“Oh of course.”

“Ornette?”

“Yes, I love Ornette, I haven’t listened to him a lot lately. Love his writing.”

“So the years in New York went on, and you were getting yourself established there, doing gigs, sometimes just putting the hat down.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“You were also doing some touring. You said you got to Japan.”

“Yes, well, I started working with this guy Richard Bona, a Cameroon bass player. Most people know him for his work with Pat Metheny, Mike Stern, Harry Belafonte, Chick Corea, he’s worked with everybody. He’s electric bass, sub-electric. Anyway, in recent years I’ve worked with his band, which again is sort of an interesting thing, it’s not really a jazz gig, it’s a pop gig, Afro pop gig, playing his music, and of course we do all the jazz festivals. A fantastic musician, one of the world’s best, greatest electric bass players living. Definitely great musicians in the band.”

“Tell me about touring in Japan. The response of the audience I’ve heard about from various musicians. I’d love to hear about that.”

“Yeah, well I was there with Gary Thomas, too, in the early ’90s. They’re really attentive and they love the music, but they’re not gonna get up and start dancing during the set, you know, or even snapping their fingers. Maybe you get someone moving a little bit. But, yeah, they’re very attentive. But going there with Richard, he’s a super star there, he’s a mysterious kind of guy to them, so they treat us great.”

“They don’t applaud until the end of the concert?”

“No.”

“Mal Waldron told me that then this wall of applause comes that practically blew him back.”

“Yeah, it can be a little disarming, especially, like, you know, Richard’s music per se is funky, anyone would want to dance to it, and you’re just looking out and everybody’s sort of sitting there and, like, ‘Do they like this?’ And then at the end you get this standing ovation like, well, ‘They musta liked it,’ but you didn’t know until then.”

“So you did the European scene too. Which festivals?”

“All of them, at this point. I’m working with David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness and we’ve done all of the major festivals.
We’ve certainly played Blue Notes in Italy, Blue Notes in Japan, other clubs. We did a live record, David Krakauer Live in Krakow, which was a really great experience because we did three sets for live audiences and we recorded five nights. You just knew you had the rest of the night, or the next night. So that was really great, it was one of the most interesting records I’ve made. And yeah, it’s a record I’m really proud of being a part of, ’cause Krakow’s a beautiful city, we spent a week there, and we played there last summer at the Jewish Music Festival. It’s a huge festival with, like 10,000 people doing hora dances in the squares. David’s a super star in Krakow, for sure.”

“Germany?”

“We played a lot in Germany, Austria.”

“How about, coming back across the ocean, South America?”

“I toured there doing the Ellington project for the State Department.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It was interesting, every country was unique. Some of the poorer countries, somebody actually came up to me and said, ‘I’ve never heard Ellington played on the electric guitar.’ And I’m sort of, like, ‘Well it’s been going on for a few years now.’ So, I mean, the audiences were really curious about the music. And I met so many just friends when I went back later to Chile to do my own thing, do a concert of my own, so I have a fondness for Chile and its people.”

“Who was with you on the state department tour?”

“It was a trio with [flutist] Jamie Baum and Jennifer Vincent on bass. Then, when I went back to Chile, I did a concert using guys from there who were fantastic, could have been in New York, just blew me away how great they played, how they swung and could read. We just had a fantastic concert. Great musicians down there.”

“Why don’t you move on to the New York years and bring it up to the present.”

“Yeah, I guess we were talking about just getting there, doing a lot of sessions,” she says, laughing. “I mean, I just, don’t know what to tell you. Gigging all the time, playing all the time. Just trying, again, to keep an open mind. I’ve also, being a guitarist, done lots of hard rock projects, played bass in rock bands. I guess I was always thinking about when I was a teenager, and I was trying to divide my time between playing heavy metal and jazz. I thought they were so separate. But now, having had this experience of playing straight ahead, blues, heavy metal, jazz, and then playing African pop music, when I was in Baltimore, then later with Richard Bona, and then playing Klezmer music, I actually have this holistic view of all music, and the guitar in all music. So here I am playing at CBGB [& OMFUG: Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers, a club in New York], with a hard rock band, doing tracks on some people’s records, or I’ve done some things with Irene Cara, pop singer, have actually been working on her project, which is pop, R&B, some rap on it, a really contemporary project. I don’t really see them as separate things, I don’t have to separate my mind, when I do these things. I guess it’s the kind of thing, I was thinking, when you’re young, or something, you can’t see the forest for the trees. At this point now, I just see it as they are all forms of communication and expression, and I just feel honored that I can be a part of it all. People call me, David Krakauer, or Richard Bona calls me. I’m not an African musician or I’m not a Jewish person, but there’s something in my element as a jazz player, again, what I was saying, when I was here [in the D.C./Baltimore area], playing fusion music, people were, like, ‘What is it you’re playing?’ I’m, like, ‘I’m playing Bird.’ This is my sensibility that’s coming through, that attracts people to have me on their projects, so I don’t really see them as, well, I’m doing this heavy metal gig, like I have to turn some switch or something. I’m either playing with good musicians or bad musicians, and I don’t work with bad musicians. If it’s musicians that I love to play music with, it’s gonna be a great time.”

“If you think it’s a stretch for you to be playing Klezmer, what about Don Byron? He’s in my new book and he talks about that.”

“Sure. I’d love to read that, I’d love to read his talk about it. ’Cause it is, after a while, maybe learning to use different dialects of the language. We trill like this, in this style, we bend notes like this in this style, or we don’t bend notes in this style. We still have harmony, melody, and rhythm. Africans play on this side of the beat, Jewish guys play on this side of the beat, and the jazz players play on this side of the beat. It’s all connected, to be able to switch dialects like that. Sometimes I look at my calendar for a year and think, well, I was out on tour for six weeks with Richard Bona and then I came home and did my band, my music, and then I went out on tour with David Krakauer and the Klezmer musicians, and then I came back home and did a pop project. You know, actually, I get a kick out of that, to be able to have friends in all these different worlds of music. But I see them as all connected.”

“Tell me a little about the process of getting a state department tour. How did that come about?”

“It’s sponsored by the Kennedy Center. I think now they have quartets. At the time, they were just doing trios. They’ll usually have some sort of theme. I did one that was music of Ellington, and then Louis Armstrong. They might have Latin music as a theme, or vocal. They had blues one year. It’s almost, in a way, like writing a grant. All the members of the trio have to write sort of an essay about their feelings about presenting American music and the subject that we’re presenting, and then getting letters of recommendation from people, and then, eventually, if you get picked, to do the final audition/ Then you’re really in a way presenting a workshop, because that’s what you do, you do a lot of different kinds of things on this tour. Sometimes you are just sort of cocktail music at the ambassador’s house, or sometimes you’re doing a workshop for young musicians, or you might be doing a cultural concert. So there’s a lot of different roles that you play when you’re doing this tour. You put together a program that sort of touches on any of those situations. I have to say that the competition to get the gig is high. They not only want people that have a great band, but that also can present the music in a positive way or an interesting way.”

“How do you feel about traveling?”

“I love it and I hate it. I love how we get to this beautiful concert hall, and it’s packed, and the audience loves us, and we get standing ovations, and we’re treated so great, and we play, and the sound is great, the music is great. I love it. Jet lag, waiting at the airport, and having all your bags checked, and arguing with the gate guy if you can take your guitar on, and all this stuff, that’s what they pay me for.” She laughs heartily. “That’s what they pay me for!”

“I just want to put one final question to you. When you’re not playing the guitar, or practicing the guitar, playing gigs, or getting back and forth to gigs, you have other interests, I’m sure, reading interests, or just in the arts.”

“I try to stay fit. Right now I’m into jumping rope a lot, running. I’m always involved in some sort of working-out activity. And also, I’m vegetarian, I really kind of try to stay strict. In a way, it’s a hobby, you know, particularly when I go on the road, it’s kind of a hobby, where can I find a health food store, or a vegetarian store? And also reading. Recently, I’m sort of on a fiction kick, I’m reading a Hemingway book, Islands in the Stream, so I’m sort of in a way catching up with great fiction writers that I’ve just been curious about. James Baldwin and Zecharia Sitchin would be authors that I enjoy. I have all these books at home that I’ve collected through the years, that’s my basic library, the great fiction writers.”

“Cinema?”

“I love it. Don’t make enough time for it. I love great movies. I’m always going, ‘That’s another one’ that I’m always trying to catch up with. Of course I love visual art when I get a chance. Yeah, there’s so many things I love to do, but not making the time.”

“Now, the two-nighter you’re doing tonight at Twins — you were there last night — the musicians are?”

“Aaron Walker on drums, Tom Baldwin on bass. Also I have my own trio [Gary Versace, Hammond B3, Ian Froman, drums], which I have to give you a new CD [her 2004 Bull’s Eye] of. We’ve been together since 2001 and it’s been really fantastic, to just have a regular band, the same band, it’s been a really great experience, because it’s just been growing and growing. Right now that’s also one of my focuses. I’ve always been a side person, maybe do” — holding her hands far apart — “like, this much of side person and” –- then bringing her hands halfway together –- “this much of my own project. So that’s really what my goal is now, it’s what I’m working on, is doing my project and my music more of the time, and side person less, reversing that ratio. So, yeah, I try to keep us at least working in the city all the time, at least once a month, Smoke, or Zinc Bar, 55 Bar. We go out to the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. So that’s getting us out of town. Any of those, just to keep the music going.”

“I said that was the last question but I have one more question. You do a lot of composing. Tell me briefly how you do that. Do you compose on the guitar?”

“Yeah, I usually compose on the guitar, and composing is a very lighthearted thing for me to do. It’s more of a letting go, just listening, almost transcribing. And I write a lot. Good thing about having a band playing at least once a month, I’ll bring in some new tunes, and if I don’t like one, it doesn’t go in the book. Or, you know, maybe it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t worry about it, ’cause there will be other ones that will come. So I sort of have, like, a fifteen-minute rule. If I can’t write it at one sitting, usually it doesn’t get in the book, I find. So when I find I can be the most open-minded and just let go the most, and it just comes out, those are always the keepers.”

“Do you literally write it? Pencil and paper?”

“Yes, I’ll write stuff out, ’cause I wouldn’t remember.”

“So you play a little bit, then you write some, then you go back to the guitar.”

“Yeah. But it’s usually almost like I’m transcribing, in a way, like I’ll just start an idea, and I’ll just, okay, here’s the next part of it. So it’s simultaneous, playing the idea and writing. They seem to come at once, the chords and the melody. Usually revolves around the melody. And I just let it happen. I don’t even try to think about it that much.”

“You don’t tape yourself playing or use a computer to record it or document or put it down?”

“Usually I write it but sometimes, if I’m away from the guitar, if I’m on a subway, I’ll call my answering machine and sing it. Like, I wrote a tune that’s on my new record, ‘Old and Young Blues,’ on an airplane, on a cocktail napkin. I try to remember to always travel with manuscript paper. But I just heard it, so I just made staff paper and wrote it out so I would have it. Yeah, I usually have to write them down, to document them. I guess it can happen anywhere, inspiration. It’s lighthearted, I don’t really judge it at all, I’m not attached to it. The way I am about my guitar, I’m very methodical, and I cringe if something’s wrong or I don’t like it, it’s not right. But my writing, like, ah, I don’t like it, I move on. So it’s fun, it’s been fun to write for a band. In this case, for this particular trio, I write for them, their personalities, they inspire me, ‘Ian’s gonna sound great on this.’ It’s been fun to sort of sculpt it that way, and have players as committed to doing it as I am.”

“Well I think we can conclude it with that. Thank you very much, Sheryl.”

“Thank you, Royal.”

W. Royal Stokes was editor of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association, from 1992 to 2001 and has been editor of JazzTimes and the Washington Post’s jazz critic. He is the author of The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990 (Oxford University Press, 1991), Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson (Temple University Press, 1994), Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with Forty Musicians about Their Careers in Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk About Their Lives and Careers (Oxford University Press, 2005). His novel Backwards Over will see publication in 2010. He is currently at work on a memoir and a fourth collection of jazz and blues profiles.

10 Best CDs

Fred Anderson, 21st Century Chase (Delmark)
Joshua Breakstone Trio, No One New (Capri)
The Diva Jazz Trio, Never Never Land (Arbors)
Keith Jarrett, Testament, Paris/London (ECM)
Ramsey Lewis, Songs From the Heart: Ramsey Plays Ramsey (Concord)
Irwin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, Book One (World Village/Harmonia Mundi)
Resonance Big Band Plays Tribute to Oscar Peterson (Resonance)
Roswell Rudd, Trombone Tribe (Soundscape)
Carol Sudhalter, The Octave Tunes (Alfa Music)
Mark Weinstein and Omar Sosa, Tales From the Earth (Otà)

25 Notable CDs

Harry Allen, New York State of Mind (Challenge)
Sharel Cassity, Relentless (Jazz Legacy Productions)
Marc Copland, Alone (Pirouet)
Erik Deutsch, Hush Money (Hammer & String)
Charles Evans/Neil Shah, Live at St. Stephens (Hotcup)
John Funkhouser Trio, Time (Jazsyzygy)
Abdullah Ibrahim, Senzo (Solo Piano) (Sunnyside)
Vijay Iyer Trio, Historicity (ACT Music)
Ahmad Jamal, A Quiet Time (Dreyfus Jazz)
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam)
Saltman Knowles, Yesterday’s Man (Pacific Coast)
Steve Kuhn Trio with Joe Lovano, Mostly Coltrane (ECM)
NYNDK, The Hunting of the Snark (Jazzheads)
Linda Oh Trio, Entry (Linda Oh Music)
Kyoko Oyobe, Cookin’ at Smalls (Kyoko Oyobe)
Ed Palermo Big Band, Eddy Loves Frank (Cuneiform)
Positive Catastrophe, Garabatos: Volume One (Cuneiform)
Kurt Rosenwinkel, Reflections (Word of Mouth Music)
Ada Rovatti, Green Factor, (Piloo)
Amanda Sedgwick, Delightness (Touché Music)
Simplexity, Extreme Measures (Vibration Institute Music)
Daniel Smith, Blue Bassoon (Summit)
Wadada Leo Smith, Spiritual Dimensions (Cuneiform)
Rossano Sportiello, It Amazes Me (Sackville)
Mads Tolling, The Playmaker (Madsman)
Matt Wilson Quartet, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Palmetto)
Miguel Zenon, Esta Plena (Marsalis Music)

20 Best Vocal CDs

Jen Chapin, Revisions: Songs of Stevie Wonder (Chesky)
Charito, Watch What Happens: Charito Meets Michel Legrand (CT Music)
Mimi Jones, A New Day (Hot Tone Music)
Joe Locke, Featuring Vocalist Kenny Washington, For the Love of You (E1 Music)
The Manhattan Transfer, The Chick Corea Songbook (Four Quarters Entertainment)
Gail Marten, In Love . . . Again (Jazz Palette)
Susie Meissner With Special Guest Brian Lynch (LydianJazz)
Antoinette Montague, Behind the Smile (In The Groove)
Gretchen Parlato, In a Dream (Obliq Sound)
Gail Pettis, Here In the Moment (OA2)
Madeleine Peyroux, Bare Bones (Rounder)
Kermit Ruffins, Livin’ a Tremé Life (Basin Street)
Daryl Sherman, Johnny Mercer: A Centennial Tribute (Arbors)
Lisa Sokolov, A Quiet Thing (Laughing Horse)
Tessa Souter, Obsession (Motéma)
Tierney Sutton, Desire (Telarc)
Patricia Talem, Patricia Talem (NuGroove Music/Points South Music)
Kristina Train, Spilt Milk (Blue Note)

10 Best Blues CDs

Fiona Boyes, Blues Woman (Yellow Dog)
Shemekia Copeland, Never Going Back (Telarc)
John Hammond, Rough & Tough (Chesky)
Bryan Lee, My Lady Don’t Love My Lady (Justin Time)
David Maxwell & Louisiana Red, You Got to Move (BlueMax)
Johnny Rowls, Ace of Spades (Catfood)
Chris Smither, Time Stands Still (Signature Sounds)
Loudon Wainwright III, Hide Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project (2nd Story Sound)
Zora Young, The French Connection (Delmark)

10 Best Beyond CDs

The American Music Project, On the Bright Side (Inarhyme)
Basia, It’s That Girl Again (Koch)
Rosanne Cash, The List (Manhattan)
Bonsoir Catin, Vive L’Amour (Valcour)
Casey Driessen, Oog (Red Shoe)
The Fugs, Be Free: Final CD Part 2, (Fugs)
Carrie Rodriguez, Live in Louisville (Luz Music)
Jessica Pavone, Songs of Synastry and Solitude (Tzadik)
Tinariwen, Imidiwan: Companions (World Village/Harmonia Mundi)
Gabriela Torres, No Tan Distinta (World Village/Harmonia Mundi)

5 Best Holiday Season CDs

The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford: Carols By Candlelight (Harmonia Mundi)
Alexis Cole, The Greatest Gift: Songs of the Season (Motéma)
Allan Harris, Dedicated to You: Allan Harris Sings a Nat King Cole Christmas (Love Production)
Chris Dawson, Stridin’ Through Christmas (Astin Music)
Kermit Ruffins, Have a Crazy Cool Christmas (Basin Street)

25 Best Reissues All Genres

Louis Armstrong, The Complete Decca Recordings, 1935-1946 (Mosaic)
The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out (Columbia Legacy)
John Coltrane, Side Steps (Prestige/Concord)
Miles Davis & Sonny Rollins, The Classic Prestige Sessions, 1951-1956 (Prestige/Concord)
Rumel Fuentes, Corridos of the Chicano Movement (Arhoolie)
Red Garland Quintet with John Coltrane, Dig It! (Prestige/Concord)
Bob Greene, St. Peter Street Strutters (Delmark)
Lionel Hampton, Centennial Celebration (Original Jazz Classics/Concord)
Jefferson Airplane, The Woodstock Experience (RCA Legacy)
Janis Joplin, The Woodstock Experience (Columbia Legacy)
Scott LaFaro: Pieces of Jade (Resonance)
The Best of Mance Lipscomb (Arhoolie)
Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um (Columbia Legacy)
Thelonious Monk Quintet (Prestige/Concord)
Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grapppelli, Biréli LaGrène, Richard Galliano, et alii, Generation Django (Compilation Dreyfus Jazz)
Sonny Rollins with Thelonious Monk/Kenny Dorham (Prestige/Concord)
Santana, The Woodstock Experience (Columbia Legacy)
Brother John Sellers: Paris 1957 (Sackville)
Artie Shaw, Classic Artie Shaw Bluebird and Victor Sessions (Mosaic)
Frank Sinatra, Sinatra: New York (Sinatra Enterprises/Warner Music)
Sly and the Family Stone, The Woodstock Experience (Epic Legacy)
Terry Waldo’s Gutbucket Syncopators with Special Guest Edith Wilson: The Ohio Theatre Concert (Delmark)
Ben Webster, Centennial Celebration (Original Jazz Classics/Concord)
Johnny Winter, The Woodstock Experience (Columbia Legacy)

10 Best DVDs

Count Basie & His Orchestra: Live in Berlin & Stockholm 1968 (Improv Jazz)
Chris Barber, As We Like It (MVD Entertainment Group)
Coleman Hawkins, In Europe: London, Paris & Brussels (Standing Ovation)
The New Lost City Ramblers, Always Been a Rambler (Arhoolie)
Old Crow Medicine Show, Live at the Orange Peel and Tennessee Theatre (Nettwerk Productions)
Madeleine Peyroux, Somethin’ Grand (Rounder)
Mr B & Bob Seely, Back to Back (Aplethora Productions)
Lisa Sokolov, Solo Live (Laughing Horse)
Art Tatum, The Art of Jazz Piano (MVD Visual)
Woodstock Diary 1969, Friday Saturday Sunday (Wienerworld/Warner Bros Pictures and Gravity Ltd)

The Art of Jazz: Monterey Jazz Festival/50 Years by Keith and Kent Zimmerman (Monterey Jazz Festival) provides a pictorial and verbal history of this great annual gathering of jazz artists of all eras and styles from its creation in 1957 to 2007. Each year is represented by its program cover or a poster, all of them stunning works of art, and a list of the performers. An essay, sprinkled with photographs of some of the musicians, introduces each decade and recounts some of the highlights of that ten-year span. For example, “The Young Lions and the departing Lyons: Decade Four 1988-1997” recognizes the contributions of both eighty-seven-year-old Stephane Grappelli and Joshua Redman’s generation and pays homage to the festival’s founding father Jimmy Lyons, who died in 1994, and Dizzy Gillespie, who died a year earlier and had kicked off the very first Monterey event “with a respectful ‘Star Spangled Banner’.” It also recounts the stunning performance of Diana Krall, who took the 1997 event by storm, launching a career that continues to blossom. Clint Eastwood, who attended the first Monterey Jazz Festival and joined its Board of Directors in the early 1990s, contributes the volume’s brief foreword.

Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion, by Paul Grushkin and Dennis King (Chronicle Books) “chronicles the unprecedented wave of poster creation around the globe,” promises its jacket blurb. The massive coffee-table size volume lives up to that promise with its “more than 1,800 eye-popping reproductions” of poster art post-dating the LP period. For rock fans, “the poster has rushed to fill the void” created by the demise of the LP and the resulting circumstance that the CD “put no value on package art,” says Grushkin in his portion of the Author Prefaces. King adds, “From the first straightforward boxing-style posters of the early ’50s through the rich and vibrant posters of the psychedelic era, to the stark immediacy of the punk flier, posters have continued to evolve and reflect the times in which they were created.” Chock-full of essays such as “The Silkscreen Movement,” “Taking it to the Streets,” and “The Devil Made Me Do It,” the volume is a documentary of an era and of an art form and a visual banquet.

Blue Note Photography: Francis Wolff/Jimmy Katz by Rainer Placke and Ingo Wulff, editors (JazzPrezzo) is a celebration of the Blue Note record label’s 2009 seventieth anniversary with 188 duotone photographs plus essays by jazz author Ashley Kahn, recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall, archivist and producer Michael Cuscuna, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, and photographer Jimmy Katz. The 142 photos by the late Francis Wolff, the co-founder (with Alfred Lion) of the label, span the period 1946 to 1967 and the 46 by Jimmy Katz 1994 to 2009. To say that both photographers are artists of the first water would be an understatement. The shoots were mostly either in Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey recording studio or in New York rehearsal locations. Among those captured in action are Sidney Bechet, Art Hodes, Albert Nicholas, and Pop Foster rehearsing in 1946; saxophonists Johnny Griffin, John Coltrane, and Hank Mobley recording in 1957; Billy Higgins, eyes closed, drumming for Donald Byrd’s LP Royal Flush; Diane Reeves and Cassandra Wilson, both with wide smiles, sing into a microphone; keyboardist John Medeski’s foregrounded and photographically exaggerated left hand reaches to the upper deck of the keys; a seated and grinning saxophonist James Moody holds a sheet of music for a harmonica-blowing Toots Thielemans. Eric Dolphy, sitting with right hand resting upon his lap-held saxophone and the left a fist against his cheek, gazes dreamily; McCoy Tyner and saxophonist Wayne Shorter study a score on the piano; trumpeters Marcus Printup, Freddie Hubbard, and Tim Hagans stare intently at the arrangement on the music stand; pianist Jason Moran strolls purposely from the Village Vanguard’s doors. Two accompanying CDs take one into the music of the label’s artists, from Albert Ammons’ Boogie Woogie Stomp and Sidney Bechet’s “Summertime” to Dexter Gordon’s “Cheese Cake,” John Scofield’s “I’ll Take Les,” Cassandra Wilson’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Joe Lovano’s “Duke Ellington Sound of Love,” and a dozen and a half more selections.

Blue Note Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff by Michael Cuscuna, Charlie Lourie, and Oscar Schnider (Universe Publishing) is another collection of Wolff’s work, mostly black and white images culled from an archive of 30,000 frames. These scenes taken in Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, New Jersey, studio have the music all but leaping off the page. “Here is an artist at work, capturing . . . the majesty of the music and the personality of the musicians,” say Michael Cuscuna and the late Charlie Lourie in their Introduction. Caught in studio performance are artists of several eras, including Bunk  Johnson, Art Hodes, James P. Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Sidney Bechet, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, Zoot Sims, McCoy Tyner, Tony Williams, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, brothers Elvin, Thad, and Hank Jones, and scores more.

January 23, 2010 will be the 100th Centenary of Django Reinhardt’s birth and it has been a half-century plus since his death, yet many of his albums are available as CDs and his legacy burgeons by the year as combos recreate his sounds in concert, on the club scene, and in the recording studio. For example, the Django Reinhardt Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary for a week at Birdland this fall and this year Britain’s JSP Records released a boxed set of five CDs of his remastered Postwar Recordings 1944-1953. Now we have the splendid Django Reinhardt and the Illustrated History of Gypsy Jazz by Michael Dregni with Alain Antonietto and Anne Legrand, a lavish production by Speck Press, which lists in its bibliography one short of a dozen other volumes on the great guitarist published since the 1940s. I cannot think of more than a handful of jazz artists who have had that many studies and memoirs devoted to them. Django’s name, of course, is the first –- and for many the only –- to surface when the subject of Europe’s contribution to jazz comes up. As unfair as that is, considering the attention long paid the art form throughout the Continent and the UK, it is in a way understandable in terms of the impact he has had on guitarists of every jazz style. The volume in question will tell you not only everything you have wanted to know about Django but provides a detailed account of the influence he wielded throughout the Gypsy and jazz communities here and abroad. As for the photographs and illustrations, they represent, as the subtitle promises, an overview of Gypsy jazz and are truly impressive, ranging from early 20th Century Gypsy traveling circuses to 14-year-old banjoist Django to him being closely observed by Duke Ellington and Rex Stewart as he plays in Paris in 1939 to a 2002 scene of Django’s great-grandson and disciple (via recordings) Dallas Baumgartner jamming in a Gypsy campsite, plus several hundred more of musicians of the Gypsy jazz genre, mostly abroad but here as well. The book is a treasure house of Django lore and a visual treat.

Doo-Wop Pop by Roni Schotter, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Amistad/Harper Collins), a children’s book of catchy verse and heartfelt art work, tells the story of Mr. Searle, a school janitor who, drawing from his former singing career, coaches in harmony and dance a half-dozen African American students, encouraging them to “listen to the world” and “Catch the thing that makes you feel like you just have to sing!” At book’s close the a cappella sextet finds itself inadvertently performing for the entire student body and their teachers.

The Elvis Encyclopedia, by Adam Victor (Overlook Duckworth) brings together between covers, in 598 pages with 300 or so photographs, everything anyone could possibly want to know about The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and deserves its jacket description as the “definitive one-stop resource” and “the most comprehensive book on Elvis ever published.” It seems unlikely that any fact or detail of Elvis’ life and career, no matter how obscure, has escaped the notice of Adam Victor, who also authored The Marilyn Encyclopedia and spent six years researching and preparing his Elvis tome.

The Ghosts of Harlem by Hank O’Neal (Vanderbilt University Press) This collection of interviews and photos is a major contribution both to jazz historiography and the annals of American cultural history. I know of no other that deals exclusively with the career histories of jazz musicians who were Harlem-based in the 1920s until the 1950s. In addition to the images of the musicians (the “Ghosts”) shot during the time of the interviews (1985-2007), the volume contains a collection of photographs of former Harlem jazz venues. Hank O’Neal’s half-century acquaintance with jazz combined with the several hats he has worn over the course of those decades — in the recording studio, at his typewriter (and computer), and behind the camera — have fashioned him as virtually without peer among those who would have the temerity to undertake this sort of project. Along with other questions, O’Neal asked his interviewees, Why has Harlem deteriorated so and Why have so few musicians seldom, if ever, returned there to perform? The responses cover a spectrum of musical and social history. Among the forty-two interviewed and photographed are Benny Carter, Doc Cheatham, Cab Calloway, Milt Hinton, Buck Clayton, Maxine Sullivan, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Thelma Carpenter, and Billy Taylor. As to the shameful neglect of Harlem’s jazz land marks, that circumstance is movingly depicted in the photographs of Minton’s, Connie’s Inn, Pod’s and Jerry’s, and dozens of other clubs, bars, and dancehalls that once featured hundreds of great musicians, many of them cited in the captions of the photographs. The stark tragedy of this neglect is given heartbreaking illustration in photo after photo in the astonishing set of frames shot by O’Neal. Looking through them, I was saddened to see boarded up and abandoned edifices and in some cases garish replacements such as the C-Town Supermarket. These also are truly ghosts of a bygone era.

It is to O’Neal’s credit that he has combined these photographs with those that he shot of the musicians, for the most part in their homes. That he shot them with an ancient wooden view camera, setting up lights, inserting a plate, and throwing a cloth over his head and the instrument (shades of Matthew Brady!) says much about his determination to capture that “moment of truth” in the best possible light. Which he did in image after image. The inclusion of a CD featuring seventeen of the “Ghosts recording “toward the end of their careers” (1972-1996) enhances the enjoyment of this marvelous contribution to jazz history and photography. Congressman Charles B. Rangel provides a foreword.

Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein (University of Michigan Press) might seem a stretch of a fit within this survey, yet it does indeed have jazz connections. Ormes resided in Chicago’s integrated Sutherland Hotel, which her husband Earl managed and on the first floor of which was the Sutherland Lounge, a jazz club that in the 1950s and ’60s presented Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Von Freeman, the Gerry Mulligan Big Band, and many others. Jackie and Earl “fit comfortably into friendships with . . . the entertainers who performed and stayed there,” including Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Jazz themes made their way into one of Ormes’ comic strips, the title character of Torchy Brown in “Dixie to Harlem” becoming a dancer in New York’s Cotton Club and a friend of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. A social activist whose views were expressed through her comic strip characters, Ormes “expounded . . . on taxes, labor strikes, McCarthyism,” issues of race, and environmental pollution. With a seventy-page account of Ormes’ life and career and eighty pages of delightful samples of her art with accompanying commentary, this volume is full of insights into African American culture and society and is a vastly entertaining visual experience.

Charles L. Robinson, a former staff photographer of the Monterey Jazz Festival, and Al Young, poet laureate of California, collaborate on Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills and Frames (Heyday Books), the former providing the images and commentary, the latter “poetic takes and riffs” and an introduction. The black and white photos were shot during 1969-72 at Monterey and several venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Marin County. Here, mostly caught while performing, are Earl Hines, Don Ellis, Carmen McRae, Jimmy Rushing, Mary Lou Williams, Joe Morello, Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Elvin Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Anita O’Day, Thelonious Monk, and a dozen or so more. This is a gem of a collection and a window into an era. Robinson catches the proverbial moments of truth and the prints are sharp. Young’s prose illuminates and his “takes  and riffs” serve as hip accompaniment.

Jazzmatazz, written by Stephanie Calmenson and illustrated by Bruce Degen (Harper Collins Childrens Books) relates in verse the individual and collective musical contributions of a house-invading field mouse, the resident dog, cat and bird, and the home-owning couple and their toddler son. Splashed with color and enlivened with such quatrains as “But my feet are tapping/And they just won’t stop/Will you look at me now?/I’ll tap till I drop!”, this will make an ideal gift and splendid introduction to jazz for that beginning reader –- such as, down the road a piece, my now infant grandson Coen Royal Stokes.

William Claxton, who surfaces several other times in this survey, was one of the great photographers of the second half of the Twentieth Century, shooting not only jazz musicians but scenes of American life. The former is the focus of Jazz Seen (Taschen), which has the photographer relating, picture-by-picture, the circumstances of the individual shoots. One section is devoted to summer 1960 New Orleans jazz funerals; a two-page spread of five photos depicts a 1962 Ray Charles recording session; Lena Horner is caught singing to Las Vegas dancers in 1958 and Terry Gibbs in a jam at home in sharp background focus at the piano while a motion-blurred couple dances in the foreground; in a famous shot, a seated and bare torso Chet Baker looks down upon friend Halima, who, kneeling, dreamily rests her head against his forearm and touches the keys of the trumpet in Baker’s hand; Thelonious Monk stands smiling with delight on the rear platform of a San Francisco cable car; Bing Crosby at a Hollywood mike is recording with traditional trumpeter Bob Scobey in 1957 and Frank Sinatra is peering with winning smile from a partially opened six-foot-high steamer trunk. Don Heckman, in the book’s introduction, quotes critic Leonard Feather: “Claxton has an eye for more than the obvious picture presented by his subjects. Often, along with the settings in which he showed them, they became metaphors for the Zeitgeist, for a whole era of musical evolution.”

Letters, postcards, telegrams, fliers, newspaper clippings, album covers, the legendary singer and 12-string guitarist’s FBI Record and “Proclamation By The Governor of the State of Texas” pardoning him from prison for “Assault to murder,” and assorted other memorabilia, all of the above in facsimile, plus countless photographs make of Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures by Tiny Robinson and John Reynolds, editors, (Steidl) a browser’s paradise. The photographs include Lead Belly at club gigs and in concert, in portraiture, sculpture, collage, caricature, pen sketch, and publicity shots, with friends and fans, singers Josh White and Burl Ives, trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Bill Dillard, clarinetist George Lewis, and trombonist Big Chief Russell Moore. “If you try to trace what Lead Belly’s influence really was, you’ll find it’s impossible to circumscribe it. It’s so wide, so all-inclusive, all over the world,” observes Oscar Brand in the caption beneath a photo of him with the book’s co-editor and niece of the singer Tiny Robinson taken at the 2004 Lead Belly Tribute Concert attended by Odetta, Harry Belefonte, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Robert Plant, Alison Krause, and others who credit Lead Belly as a mentor. Tom Waits contributes an introduction, Glenn O’Brien a foreword, and Tyehimba Jess poems.

The photographs in the eponymously titled Jim Marshall/Jazz (Chronicle Books) were shot in New York clubs and recording studios in 1962-63 and in San Francisco and Monterey in the mid-60s, early ’70s, and late ’80s. That Marshall gained intimate access to his subjects is evident from his capturing of, for example, a bare-chested Miles Davis relaxing at home, Thelonious Monk in his apartment kitchen with wife, daughter, and son and looking askance at the photographer with mischievous grin, and a pensive Sammy Davis Jr. in a studio dressing room. “I’ve tried to capture the intensity and elegance of these people,” says Marshall in his Acknowledgments. He has succeeded and then some. Especially delightful, and moving, is the comradeship displayed in many backstage shots in which Marshall has caught musicians cutting up or solemnly serious, for example, Count Basie and Billy Eckstine convulsed in laughter, or poet Allen Ginsberg “looking at Thelonious Monk like he’s looking at God.” For many of the frames Marshall posed his subject or subjects but there are some riveting shots of musicians blowing, including those of Duke Ellington, Anita O’Day, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Helen Humes, Elmo Hope, Jimmy Witherspoon, Dinah Washington, and Sonny Rollins. The late dean of West Coast jazz critics Philip Elwood provides an introduction that is both an appreciation of the sublime art of and a fascinating view of the on-site M.O. of Marshall, whom Elwood often observed at work.

John & Yoko: A New York Love Story by Allan Tannenbaum (Insight Editions/Palace Press International) is a lovingly designed and brilliantly executed commemoration of the personal, professional, and aesthetic relationship of two renown artists in the sensitively composed and technically polished photography of noted photojournalist Tannenbaum, who provides via several essays a prose timeline of his exposure to and acquaintance with the couple. Lennon was murdered in December 1980 only weeks after the bulk of the volume’s photographs were taken. As a couple and as individuals, John and Yoko are caught in varied contexts including at a gig, in Yoko’s art studio, on the street, and at home. One section comprises five frames of the couple undressing followed by ten shots of them nude in bed. “John & Yoko: A New York Love Story is a celebration of one of the great romances of our time,” says Chris Murray, founder and director of Washington, D.C.’s Govinda Gallery, in his introduction to the volume.

Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir by Amalie R. Rothschild with Ruth Ellen Gruber (Thunder’s Mouth Press) presents some of the “defining moments of rock history,” says its jacket blurb, and a cruise through the volume verifies this claim. Both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker, Rothschild, between 1968 and 1971, captured in black and white and color such of those moments as John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a surprise encore to a set by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in June 1971; Jimi Hendrix at Café Au Go Go in March 1968, “one of my first rock music pictures”; a triple exposure in color of Joni Mitchell in April 1969; Taj Mahal backed by four tubas in a stunning scene citied by Rothschild as her “favorite black & white light show photograph.” There are also lively in-performance shots of Janis Joplin, Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Chuck Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others. “I loved the music at the Fillmore East. But I can say that I was IN love with the technical side of everything that went into putting on the shows, and I made it a point to take detailed photographs of all phases of these activities,” says Rothschild in the book’s first chapter, “The Cradle of Rock.” The second chapter, “Theater of Light: The Joshua Light Show,” gives us a detailed verbal description, supplemented with photographs both of the operation and the resulting display of the “music mirrored in color.” The chapter is a fascinating account and the accompanying images in color in which Rothschild captured examples of the light shows are nothing short of stunning, works of visual art, really.

Lee Tanner has published a number of sterling collections of his own photos but his Masters of Jazz Photography (Harry N. Abrams) features only a dozen or so of his images since the focus of this compilation is upon full-page images shot by Ray Avery, Ole Brask, William Claxton, Esmond Edwards, William Gottlieb, Tad Hershorn, Milt Hinton, Herman Leonard, Charles Peterson, Gjon Miller, Carole Reiff, Don Schlitten, Chuck Stewart, Val Wilmer, Frank Wolff, and a dozen others. Dismissing the term “jazz photographer” in his Afterword, Tanner adds, “They are great photographers in the tradition of important twentieth-century masters such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Dorothea Lange. They are storytellers. And the history of jazz is the story of the geniuses all brilliantly shown here.” Among the priceless scenes are: tenor legends Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins blowing at a recording session, New York, 1957 (Don Hunstein); Louis Armstrong in a backstage jam with Tommy Dorsey, Bud Freeman, Pops Foster, Eddie Condon, George Wettling, and Red Allen (Willie The Lion Smith is off camera) in 1937 (Charles Peterson); Dinah Washington caught onstage belting a swinger while in a gripping 90º bent-forward dance move, L.A., 1959 (William Claxton); Ornette Coleman looking on appreciatively as drummer Charles Moffett solos, Copenhagen, 1965 (Jan Persson); a half-dozen drummers (Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Zutty Singleton, Sonny Greer, Art Blakey, George Wettling) and others waiting on a Brownstone’s steps for the Great Day in Harlem Art Kane shoot of fifty-seven jazz legends, 1958 (Milt Hinton); a laughing Horace Silver in rehearsal with Louis Hayes, Gene Taylor, Bill Hardman, and Junior Cook, New York, 1958 (Carole Reiff). Nat Hentoff pens the Introduction.

In 2001 Walter Hanlon retrieved from a chest of drawers the negatives from which he then made new prints for his 1950s Jazz In London and Paris: Walter Hanlon Photography (Tempus Publishing Ltd/Trafalgar Square Publishing/Independent Publishers Group). It is indeed a riveting array and an important documentation of a scene not familiar to American jazz critics and aficionados in that it fixes in time the initial visits to England and France after WWII of many U.S. jazz artists, along with the British and French musicians with whom they mingled. Two shots of Sidney Bechet, one of my main men, are dear to me, one of him relaxed while seated on a couch and smoke-wreathed from his cigarette, the other “in full-flowing vibrato” with Parisian Claude Luter’s band. Another personal hero, Gene Krupa, is shown in action behind his drums and then at rest with seven admiring British musicians transfixed behind him. Using a Rolleiflex, Hanlon caught many of his subjects in the throes of blowing. He preferred natural light but of necessity, when in dark cellar venues, he resorted to flash. In both cases he was a master of chiaroscuro. In addition to a number of British and French players –- Ronnie Scott, Humphrey Lyttelton, John Dankworth, Cleo Laine, Chris Barber, Stephan Grappelli, Luter –- we see Lester Young, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Eartha Kitt, Josh White, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Big Bill Broonzy, stogie-puffing comedian Jimmy Durante (in the late 1910s and early 1920s he was pianist with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings), and others. As John Dankworth says in his Foreword, “The inspired jazz phrase has its parallel in the inspired click of the shutter to capture a moment when the whole story is told without a word being written or spoken –- or even played or sung!” Walter Hanlon was there during a momentous time to click that shutter, capturing precious moments.

Master photographer William Claxton’s New Orleans 1960 (Taschen) predates by a year the purchase of Preservation Hall by Allan and Sandra Jaffe and its consequent international fame so you will find only one photograph representing it, a shot of instruments awaiting their players, the bass drum emblazoned with the name of that institution’s world-traveling band. The collection’s more than 150 mostly black and white photos capture aspects of the city’s African American life, most of them connected with its music scene, for example, bands accompanying funerals, young street musicians, blues players in Angola Prison, and individual photos of historical figures such as clarinetists Alphonse Picou and George Lewis, singer Lizzie Miles, and trombonist Jim Robinson. The New Orleans visit was one stop in a national tour made by Claxton and German jazz historian and critic Joachim Berendt “to record America’s original art form.” The photographer provides a preface and his companion the introduction.

Dignity, sensitivity, insight, and an uncanny eye for framing his subject, subjects, or scene mark the work of Charles Harris (1908-98). He was dubbed “One Shot” because that’s all he usually took with his Speed Graphic, the newspaper photographer’s camera of choice during an earlier era. A prominent, respected, and trusted member of the Pittsburgh ‘s Hill District, the city’s black community, Harris, across five decades commencing in the 1930s, took some 80,000 images as a freelancer and as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black-owned national weekly. Collected in One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris by Stanley Crouch (Harry N. Abrams) are images of Martin Luther King Jr., Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Joe Louis, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Danny Kaye, Ray Charles, Cassius Clay, Jackie Robinson, Sam Cooke, Charlie Parker, George Benson, Jay and Bobby McNeely, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, a coal miner, cobbler, fireman, railroad engineer, mechanic, blind broom maker, police officer, constable, waitress, barber, elderly women on the porch of an old-folks home, youngsters at play, grown-ups flirting, bakers baking, and wide-angle shots of a parade, a roller rink fire, Billy Eckstine’s band, JFK delivering a speech to an immense street crowd, and car-filled or empty intersections. Like a worthy jazz solo, One Shot Harris’ images tell a story. Stanley Crouch provides a splendid introduction to Pittsburgh’s history and defines the historic and aesthetic importance of photographer Harris and his work. Deborah Willis offers a biographic account of this important and long neglected American artist.

The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theater, Film, and Televsion, edited by Thomas Hischak (Oxford University Press) is not properly of the visual category but rather a splendid reference work of more than two thousand entries, hundreds of which are accompanied by scenes from the films or plays, photos of the composers, or in some cases posters advertising the productions. Dirty Dancing, for example, has the late Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey on their knees on the dance floor in an eye-to-eye stare boldly indicative of intent. Barbra Streisand is shown donning roller skates in a still from the cinematic version of Funny Girl and Snow White sits up tucked under the bed covers facing the dwarfs as they peer over the foot board. An arresting shot, from Porgy and Bess, is of the “residents of Catfish Row reacting to the bully Crown as he turns a crap game into a fight.” Sidebars add stats, for example, “Longest-Running Broadway Musicals” and “Longest-Running Off Broadway Musicals.” Many entries have by their sides a list of the production’s songs. In his introduction, editor Hischak clarifies that he has not “limited entries to Americans and American musicals” but has included “foreign works and international artists . . . if they were very popular [or] very influential in the States.” Thus we find Les Misérables, works by Noel Coward, and artists the likes of Maurice Chevalier. This volume will long remain the definitive account of its subject. Put it beside your reading chair or on the bedside table for endless hours of exploration.

Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press) by Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson. Bassist Milt Hinton (1910-2000) is credited with being the most-recorded jazz musician of all time, having appeared on nearly 1200 recordings. He began carrying a 35mm camera in the 1930s and over the following six decades shot more than 60,000 photos of his friends and musical associates. This magnificent volume contains his autobiography and more than 250 of his images. His life story documents in words a big slice of Twentieth Century African American history and the photos a visual narrative of the jazz life across six decades. Berger and Maxson are veterans of Hinton studies, he having co-authored two earlier collections of the bassist’s photos, she having spent three decades organizing his images for exhibit and publication.

PoPsie: American Popular Music Through The Camera Lens of William “PoPsie” Randolph by Michael Randolph, foreword by Quincy Jones (Hal Leonard). Randolph was ubiquitously on the New York scene from the 1940s to the ’70s shooting black and white photos of a broad sweep of musicians that included Broadway performers, early rock ’n’ rollers, r&b pioneers, and jazz artists. A 1951 scene of Metronome magazine’s poll winners in jam session has Miles Davis, trombonist Kai Winding, and a reed section of John LaPorta, Lee Konitz, Stan Getz, and Serge Chaloff. At the 1953 Metro All Stars event Randolph captures pioneer modern jazz drummer Max Roach and saxophone legend Lester Young backstage for a smoke.  Also in the volume are: singers Frankie Laine and Patti Page, she perched on the piano, he seated at its keyboard and both flashing smiles for the camera in 1950; saxophone giant Coleman Hawkins, eyes closed, in a 1949 shot of him deep into a solo; pianist Mary Lou Williams, in 1948, playing while a crowd presses forward to her right, youngsters in the foreground, one of whom clutches the piano’s wood; a 1966 club shot of Wilson Pickett supported by Jimi Hendrix; Sonny and Cher displaying their first gold record in 1965; the Beatles at a Capitol Records party in 1964; Barbra Streisand backstage during the cast recording of 1965’s Funny Girl; the Rolling Stones in 1964 on a Broadway sidewalk on the day of their arrival for their first U.S. tour; Elvis and his band the Jordinaires working on an arrangement, 1956. This is the stuff of musical history, and Randolph has recorded it in high style.

Prestige Records: The Album Cover Collection, compiled and edited by Geoff Gans (Concord Editions), commences with the early era of the LP, for example, monochrome covers of Miles Davis: The New Sounds and Stan Getz: Volume One. Then we cruise through the 1950s into the late ’60s to such eye-popping covers as Don Schlitten’s optical illusion of concentric circles for Jaki Byard‘s On the Spot! and Esmond Edwards’ haunting image in blue for Kenny Dorham’s Quiet Kenny. Richard “Prophet” Jennings’ surreal moonscape-like painting of a bass fiddle hovering above a metronome adorns the cover of Eric Dolphy’s Out There and Mad magazine cartoonist Don Martin’s illustrations for Miles Davis and Horns and Trombone by Three (J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, and Benny Green) are hilarious. Critic Ira Gitler, a one-time aid to Prestige Records owner Bob Weinstock, provides an introductory account of the procession of artists, designers, and photographers who contributed to the label’s visual art. This volume is truly a feast for the eyes. And for the ears, a CD compilation of Prestige artists is tucked inside its back cover. As Geoff Gans observes in his Editor’s Note, these Prestige album covers are indicative of “what infinite possibilities there [are] in the matching of music and art.”

Roger Steffens and Peter Simon have indeed put together a Reggae Scrapbook (Insight Editions/Palace Press International) in that their 150-page compilation comes with ersatz 45RPMs, postcards, booklets, flyers, and other memorabilia tucked into envelopes taped to pages and a DVD of interviews with stars of the genre. Bob Marley, the Skatalites, Jimmy Cliff, Toots & the Maytals, Peter Tosh (“It’s against my religion not to smoke herb.”), Burning Spear, Marcia Griffiths, and many others are here in color and black and white photos plus informative essays on their histories. This is a splendid celebration of an important and globally popular music.

Lynn Goldsmith, producer, songwriter, and filmmaker, was also without question one of the premier photographers of the rock era from its beginnings in the 1960s through the punk and later styles into the 1980s. She has gathered together some of her finest work in both color and black and white in Rock and Roll (Harry N. Abrams). All the superstars and many others are here, in cities from coast to coast and at a handful of locations overseas, most of them captured in action onstage, a few in transit (she sometimes accompanied tours) or in dressing rooms. Many of the action shots are nothing less than startling, some musicians captured in mid-air leaps, others with expressions of pure agony cum ecstasy as singers reached for that high note or guitarists strived for the perfect chord or hottest lick. Goldsmith has a super quick eye and her camera skills are phenomenal. Iggy Pop pens the Foreword. This superb collection is very handsomely produced. And it rocks!

We have long been aware of Louis Armstrong’s writing talents, for he penned two autobiographies and carried along on tours a portable typewriter on which he regularly dashed off myriad letters to relatives, friends, musical and business associates, and fans. He also owned two reel-to-reel tape recorders via which, both on the road and at home, he (apparently intentionally) left for posterity reminiscences, private thoughts that convey his anger at the racism he frequently encountered, conversations (some of them intimate), anecdotes, risqué jokes, radio and television news bulletins, and music dubbed off of recordings, accompanying a few of these last-named on trumpet. In Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong by Steven Brower (Harry N. Abrams) we learn that the covers of the 650 boxes of audiotape, which date from the early 1950s until the year of Armstrong’s death, 1971, are graced with collages that, wielding scissors, he put together from photographs, newspaper and magazine ads and clippings, and items of memorabilia such as membership I.D.s, greeting cards, and telegrams, adding to many of them a hand-written notation. It is a hundred or so of these strikingly original creations, plus some album covers, early photographs, and handwritten and typed letters, that make up the extraordinary contents of this volume. Its variety reveals Pops’ talent and zeal for collage and provides many insights into his personality and character. The volume is vastly entertaining. The boxed tapes, along with twelve shelf feet of Armstrong papers and documents, are housed in the archives of the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library at Queens College. For a sampling of the audio, the second CD of Louis Armstrong: Fleishmann’s Yeast Show (Jazz Heritage Society) culls from the tapes passages of the great trumpeter and singer conversing with friends, telling stories, and so on.

In A Shot in the Dark: Making Records in Nashville, 1945-1955 (Vanderbilt University Press), British researcher of early rock ’n’ roll Martin Hawkins exhaustively mines the sources for a definitive account of the decade in question. Dance bands, gospel, and rhythm & blues figure in this authoritative volume of history and commentary. The story is enlivened with photographs on almost every page (most of them provided by courtesy of one or another organization and few with identification of the photographer), many of them heretofore unpublished. A section at book’s end lists by label –- twenty-one of them — the 78RPMs issued during the decade and a lively CD of twenty selections accompanies the book.

It is the variety and immediacy — and sheer shock value in some cases — that draw one into Pat Graham’s collection of Silent Pictures (Akashic Books). In addition to straightforward shots of the rock groups performing, there are scenes of musicians cavorting onstage, some of them prone with mouths agape. There are several effective double exposures, notably of drummers Polly Johnson and Jeremiah Green, the latter with four arms in action. Photographer, graphic designer, and artist Cynthia Connolly, who documented the hardcore punk scene in Washington, D.C., contributes an afterword that clarifies Graham’s somewhat later involvement in the same scene, including his touring with Modest Mouse in the 1980s, which provided him the opportunity to shoot the group both on the road and onstage.  We see a semi with its tractor on fire in the Mojave Desert and an impressionistic Montana landscape. Most of the photos are black and white but there is a sprinkling of color ones. A page-by-list at volume’s end identifies the individual frames.

I have always had a soft spot for drummers, having for several years in my 1940s teens had a kit on which I taught myself the rudiments and played along to my traditional jazz and Swing Era 78RPMs. During my performance-reviewing years for the Washington Post two decades ago, drummers would occasionally call me the day my review was published and thank me for remarking on, for example, their one-handed rolls or shuffle rhythms. So it was with eager anticipation that I opened Sticks ’n’ Skins: A Photography Book about the World of Drumming (Fotos by Folletts, Inc.) by Jules Follet. I was not disappointed. Its main body is devoted to six-hundred or so photos of drummers, all but a few shot by Follet. “I have been blessed to have met and photographed over 500 drummers in 53 cities in 28 months,” she says. “I am honored to pay tribute and feature the work of Lissa Wales who was my guardian angel throughout this journey.” Born in San Francisco and raised in Arizona, Lissa Wales shot hundreds of rock, blues, and jazz drummers over the course of two decades before she died in 2005 of acute myelogenous leukemia at the age of forty-eight. A 20-page section of her photos of drummers precedes the 500 pages of Follett’s work. There are also eighty or so group shots of drummers and a 20-page section on percussionists concludes the collection. The volume is a lavish display in color, really quite spectacular. The photos are accompanied by texts summarizing the subject’s career and listing his or her musical associations. Portions of some of these entries are in the words of the drummer. A good number of women find their way into the volume, including two of my favorite currently active drummers, Cindy Blackman and Sherrie Maricle, although another, Allison Miller, is missing.  Truth be told, all but a few jazz drumming icons are also missing. While about twenty are included –- e.g., Louie Bellson, Buddy Rich (shot by Wales), Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Roy Haynes, Joe Morello, Ed Shaughnessy, Bernard Purdie –- a great many of the photos are of rock musicians. This is not to say that many of these do not also have their jazz connections. All in all, Sticks ’n’ Skins is a tremendous achievement as well as a fitting tribute to the late Lissa Wales, who had a well developed photographic eye for drummers. Of course, the same can be said of Ms. Follet. Let this one find a permanent home on your coffee table. (To see some more of Lissa Wales’ photos go to www.shutterfly.com/progal/gallery.jsp?gid=768a5498ce7d3039d863.)

For those obsessed with the itineraries of rock musicians, Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & the British Blues Boom by Christopher Hjort (Jawbone Press) will fill many hours of browsing. It also will long serve as a basic source for study of the British Invasion that introduced Clapton and others to the U.S. in the 1960s. The focus in this week-by-week diary of gigs and recording sessions are the travels of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Fleetwood Mac. Notes accompany many entries and photos of the groups are dispersed throughout.

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond by Doug Ramsey (Parkside Publications, Inc.) is one of the most thorough of all jazz biographies and begs to be included in this survey by virtue of its many photographs, which depict Desmond from the cradle to his final year, 1976. Veteran jazz chronicler and critic Ramsey mined every likely source of information about the great alto saxophonist and relates his life story and career history in loving detail and with a sensitivity that makes of this book, in addition to its being an excellent documentary study and a pictorial treat, a moving account of an artist of world-class dimensions, one who possessed one of the most individual instrumental voices in jazz. The volume’s foreword is by longtime Desmond associate and close friend Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola Brubeck.

Tonya Bolden’s Take-Off: American All-Girl Bands During WWII (Alfred A. Knopf) is an account of three women-staffed big bands of the 1940s: Ada Leonard’s All-American Girl Orchestra, the Prairie View State College Co-Eds, and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. The volume commences with a page of definitions of “Swing,” my favorite of which is Benny Goodman’s: “Free speech in music.” It is a slim book (61 pages) but one chock-full of aides to further investigation of the genre and the period: a Glossary (“Cut A Rug: To dance”); six pages of Notes containing both clarifications and supporting quotations from musicians and others; three pages of Selected Sources, i.e., Books, Articles, Periodicals, Videos, Recommended Reading, and Recommended Listening; and an index. As for the photos, they appear on nearly every page and they are classic in their depiction of the role women musicians played in the jazz of that time. As for the stories contained herein, both individual and collective, of the joys and travails of the road and of the discrimination (both of gender and race) that they experienced, they are deeply moving. The book’s narrative serves as an incontrovertible corrective to the long-held notion that women instrumentalists played a minor role in the development of jazz. They were always there from the beginnings of the art form and it is long overdue that someone got the word out to a young readership, which Tonya Bolden is to be commended for having done. Not that this young adults volume lacks in charm, authoritative information, or readability for any adult interested in the subject. I found if fascinating. It comes with a CD of selections by the Sweethearts, Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears, and trumpeter Valida Snow.

Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, née Rothschild, settled in New York after her separation from her husband Jules de Koenigswarter in the early 1950s when she was in her late thirties. From this time until her death at seventy-four in 1988 she was patron to several hundred jazz musicians, befriending them, attending their performances, bailing them out of jail, taking them into her home when they were ill, becoming known as the Jazz Baroness, and having twenty or so tunes named for her, for example, Thelonious Monk’s “Pannonica” and Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream.” She was especially close to Monk, in 1957 helping him get his cabaret card reinstated and later accompanying him and his wife Nellie on domestic and overseas tours. He spent the last decade of his life in her Weehawken, New Jersey, house. Charlie Parker died at thirty-five in her Stanhope Hotel apartment in New York. Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats, Nadine de Koenigswarter, editor (Harry N. Abrams) is a collection of photographs of about two-hundred musicians, most taken by Nica’s Polaroid camera, many shot in one or another of her serial residences, others taken in New York clubs. The volume’s editor, Nica’s grandniece Nadine, has also compiled a hundred or so of the responses to Nica’s query, what were the three wishes of her musician friends. It is the intimacy of the scenes captured that makes of this volume a rewarding experience, notwithstanding the poor quality of some of the photos. Most of the answers to the query provide insights into the characters, personalities, tastes, and intellects of the respondents. Among the jazz titans who appear in photo are Art Blakey, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, and Benny Carter. Gary Giddins supplies a foreword and the editor an account of her great-aunt’s life.

Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, is in the pantheon of supporting players in the history of recorded jazz, blues, folk music, and spoken word. Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways by Richard Carlin (Harper Collins) is, just as the subtitle indicates, an account of how Asch shaped the label — now under the auspices of the Smithsonian — that has kept in print a wealth of music, spoken word, and sound effects, first as 78RPMs in the 1940s and then on LP until his death in 1986. Available today are, for example, CDs of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger; Mary Lou Williams and James P. Johnson; the Carter Family; Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the folk revival of the late 1950s and ’60s; Lucinda Williams; and spoken word through the poetry of Langston Hughes, the speeches of FDR, and the soundtrack of Emile de Antonio’s satiric documentary film Millhouse: A White Comedy, which lampooned Senator Joe McCarthy. That list is merely a tiny sampling of the offerings on the 2168 Folkways LPs that the Smithsonian acquired in 1987 and has been transferring to CD. In addition to the book’s text recounting the history of the Folkways label, this magnificent volume abounds with photographs, clippings, album covers, liner notes, posters, and other illustrations of the remarkable history of the label and the career of its guiding light Moses Asch.

W. Royal Stokes was editor of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association, from 1992 to 2001 and has been editor of JazzTimes and the Washington Post‘s jazz critic. He is the author of The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990 (Oxford University Press, 1991), Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson (Temple University Press, 1994), Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with Forty Musicians about Their Careers in Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk About Their Lives and Careers (Oxford University Press, 2005). His novel Backwards Over will see publication in 2010. He is currently at work on a memoir and a fourth collection of jazz and blues profiles.