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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195065808
• ISBN13: 9780195065800
• Release Date: November 1990
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 3.20 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.