7 ½ x 9 ½, 543 pp, brown boards, titles in gilt to spine. Unclipped, illustrated dust jacket. Chicago, Urban Research Institute, Inc., 1983.
SIGNED by Dempsey J. Travis on the title page. A fabulous oral history featuring some of America's jazz greats. Illustrated with over 200 black-and-white photos, many of them previously unpublished. With a warm introduction by Studs Terkel.
This book provides an “insider’s view of house-rent parties in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s; of the black social scene where innumerable dancehalls and nightclubs, many of them syndicate-controlled, proved a fertile spawning-ground for some of the most famous jazz artists who ever lived.
“Travis has interviewed such people as Dizzy Gillespie, Sy Oliver, Clark Terry, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Art Hodes, Dorothy Donegan, Bud Freeman, Johnny Griffith and many others who tell their own stories about the pains and pleasures of life in jazz, and who share their memories of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Fats Waller, and Roy Eldridge to name a few – and of those pre-Civil Rights days when white were not allowed to dance to the music of black bands in Miami, and blacks could not patronize New York’s famous Cotton Club where the starring acts were black.”
Near Fine with a bit of soiling on the bottom edge and slight foxing along the fore edge. The unclipped dust jacket is Near Fine, original price, with some slight edge wear and slight loss of laminate to bottom of front flap.
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