You Can't Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat

By Gene Lees

Book Overview

You Can't Steal a Gift is about the impact of American racism on America's greatest gift to the world of music--jazz. In a work that combines memoir, oral history, and commentary, Gene Lees has crafted minibiographies of four great black musicians whom he knew well--Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat "King" Cole. Lees writes of them, "All are men who had every reason to embrace bitterness . . . and didn't." When Lees left Montreal to become the music and drama critic of the Louisville Times in 1955, he was shocked by the racism and segregation he found in the United States. In jazz he found a community of like-minded souls who freely shared their gifts with all lovers of music, regardless of race and condition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803280343
• ISBN13: 9780803280342
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

An accurate history of great musicians

First- and second-person history as practised by Gene Lees and Nat Hentoff is accurate, human, informative, entertaining and deeply satisfying. It is also a refreshing palliative to the third- and fourth-hand histories that often pass for fact nowadays. To refer to Lees' writings on race as "ranting," as one reviwer has it, with that word's connotation of violence, polarizes the matter and misrepresents the thought and care that have gone into this book's discussion of race. To "skip all that," would be to remain ignorant and in denial of what it took for the four subjects of the book to achieve their status in the pantheon of American artists. Don't skip all that: read the whole thing to learn, from the artists themselves and the people close to them, more about Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton and Nat King Cole and to understand the social environment they lived and worked in.