A Life in Jazz

Jazz buffs have been waiting for Danny Barker’s full account of his life in jazz since the 1950s, when Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro published Heah Me Talkin’ to Ya, an oral history of jazz which drew heavily on Barker’s reminiscences. A jazz guitarist, Danny Barker played with many important New Orleans bands in the 1920s and then moved to New York to play with swing bands in the 1930s, notably Cab Calloway’s band, at a time when several future pioneers of the bop movement were in the band, including Dizzie Gillespie. (It is Barker who made famous the scene when Gillespie and several cohorts began playing bop during a Calloway band stage show, which produced the angry blast from Calloway, “I won’t have any of that Chinese music in my band!”) Barker’s memoirs brilliantly recreate the jazz world of New Orleans (parades, funerals, brothels, dance halls, and more) and the pioneer musicians of the day. The book is also a knowing account of the big band swing world. It will surely rank as one of the basic documents in jazz history.