Jazz Tales from Jazz Legends: Oral Histories from the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College by Monk Rowe with Romy Britell (review)

In jazz, instrumental soloists are expected to "say something," that is, to make musical remarks in a personal style that, in the absence of words, convey emotional feeling to the listener. Whether Lester Young created this idea is less relevant than that the concept has had enormous staying power over the music's history. It is also the case that telling a story in music seems to have prepared the musicians to be crack oral raconteurs, as their stories have become key components of archives, such as those at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark, Tulane University, UCLA, and the Smithsonian. To these may be added the distinguished collection at Hamilton College, begun in 1991 and excerpted in a new volume of recollections.

The jazz oral history project at Hamilton began, as so many worthy projects do, over dinner. Hamilton honorary degree recipient Joe Williams, a singer renowned for his work with Count Basie, became the instigator of the project when his conversation with fellow honoree Milt Hinton impressed his listeners and motivated them to act while time remained with these musical giants. Williams himself conducted the earliest interviews, helping Hamilton connect with Basie alumni and laying the foundation for a formal oral history project that eventually became the Fillius Jazz Archive that music instructor Monk Rowe directs. Rowe's Jazz Tales from Jazz Legends commemorates the Fillius Jazz Archive's twentieth anniversary, and proceeds from the book's sale support the archive's activities.

The book's utility for oral history practitioners is mixed. A succession of narrator transcripts would perhaps better reveal the interview process, but Rowe has instead chosen to build his book around broad themes that cut across genres and generations. The payoff is that the topical arrangement creates collective narratives portraying the nights and days of working musicians from the 1930s on—the uncertain and temporary nature of sideman gigs during the big band era, the harsh and distinctly unglamorous life on the road before interstate highways and reliable and affordable air travel, the ways various musicians confronted racial discrimination, and more. Many of the musicians are lesser known, but that gives their tales greater punch—these are the workaday musicians who kept the bands going. Rowe quotes clarinetist Kenny Davern at length and to great effect, not only because Davern is a terrific storyteller, but also because his eager jump from high school into Ralph Flanagan's 1950s big band reveals just how discouraging living the dream could be. After "sixty one-nighters in ninety days," "roasting" in a hot uniform while playing four hour-long sets each time, surviving the hazards of bad food, cramped cars, and dangerous highways, Davern did not want to hear about it from his friends when he got home. "They all wanted to do that," he recalls, "and I had done it. So I didn't see any romance in it whatsoever" (62-64).

The narrators also take up the race question with candor, and this chapter could have been longer and better connected to the changing civil rights landscape. But the stories resonate. Clark Terry recalls getting hit with a blackjack for not using the word sir when addressing a white man in the South, but also remembers the white stage workers who protected him when the offender returned at the head of a mob. The musicians affirm that playing well was the ultimate ticket for young players—the bandstand was indeed color-blind, even if the audiences and accommodations were segregated in much of the country at midcentury.

Rowe has particular professional interests of his own, and we hear more of his voice in chapters such as those on arranging and life in the recording studio. There are fewer excerpts from the interviews in the arranging chapter, and while the...