Bill Crow

The author is a bass player and writer who played with Gerry Mulligan and many others. This is one of two of his large collection of anecdotes about Jazz musicians. The stories are grouped thematically, e.g. a chapter with stories about Jazz musicians who don’t read music (Someone asked Erroll Garner why he had never bothered to learn to read music and he replied that nobody could hear him read.), and also by musician, e.g. a chapter with some of the many Benny Goodman stories. While reading these, I tended to group the anecdotes into those that couldn’t be true, those that are old jokes that someone applied to a Jazz musician, those that seem like they’ve been specifically created to highlight a known characteristic of a particular musician, and most interesting - those that involve multiple people and that the author has determined to be more or less true. The author did considerable research and in many cases he reports an interesting or well-known story from the different viewpoints of multiple participants.… (more)