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

By Gene Lees and Graham Lees

Book Overview

Gene Lees, author of the highly acclaimed Singers and the Song, offers, in Meet Me at Jim & Andy's, 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 & Andy's, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195065808
• ISBN13: 9780195065800
• Release Date: November 1990
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Revealing Vignettes!

Jim and Andy's bar, located at 48th Street and 6th Avenue in New York, was a home, restaurant, answering service, employment agency, bank, storage place, and general hang-out for some of the 60's most famous jazz musicians, including Gerry Mulligan, Clark Terry, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Eddie Davis, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims--with visits from Belafonte, Bennett, Horne, and Vaughan.Here, the bar serves primarily as a backdrop for Lees' intimate conversations with musicians and observations on the idiom. Lee admonishes critics who question the status of jazz as a "serious" art form. The rest of the book, while somewhat overly-structured, includes chapters devoted to such icons as Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Billy Taylor, and Art Farmer. The writing is uniformly lucid; the anecdotes humorous and illuminating.While the book doesn't return to a satisfying coda to either Jim and Andy's (now closed) or the new hang-outs, Lee's first person narrative conveys a singular warmth and sympathy, radiant with his love of jazz.