Meet Me at Jim & Andy's: Jazz Musicians and Their World

Meet Me at Jim & Andy's: Jazz Musicians and Their World by Lees, Gene. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780195065800.

Gene Lees, author of the highly acclaimed Singers and the Song, offers, in Meet Me at Jim & Andys, another tightly integrated collection of essays about postwar American music. This time he focuses on major jazz instrumentalists and bandleaders. In a vivid series of portraits, Lees introduces the clientele of Jim & Andys, one of the most popular New York musicians haunts in the sixties. This unforgettable gallery of individualists included Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond among many others. Lees, himself a noted songwriter, writes about these musicians with vividness and intimacy. Far from being the inarticulate jazz musicians of legend, they turn out to be eloquent indeed as the inventors of a colorful slang that has passed into the American language.