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

by Gene Lees

Book Overview

In this wise, stimulating, and deeply personal book, an eminent jazz chronicler writes of his encounters with four great black musicians: Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat "King" Cole. Equal parts memoir, oral history, and commentary, each of the main chapters is a minibiography, weaving together conversations Gene Lees had with the musicians and their families, friends, and associates over a period of several decades.

Lees begins the book with an essay that tells of his introduction to the world of jazz and his reaction to racism in the United States when he emigrated from Canada in 1955. The underlying theme in his book is the impact racism had on the four musicians' lives and careers and their determination to overcome it. As Lees writes, "No white person can even begin to understand the black experience in the United States. . . . All of the four jazz makers] are men who had every reason to embrace bitterness--and didn't."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300089651
• ISBN13: 9780300089653
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.5"

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.