Wein is eye-crossingly voluble, but he does have a lot of stories, perspectives, and music history to get off his chest.
Garrulous memoir by the music promoter and club owner who brought jazz to the masses through the Newport Jazz Festival.
“I was fortunate enough to have an older brother who set a precedent for underachieving,” writes Wein. We were all fortunate. His brother liked the jazz clubs on 52nd Street more than the classroom, and he brought young George along, nurturing in the boy a love of Art Tatum, Hot Lips Page, Thelma Carpenter, and Frankie Newton. In 1950, Wein opened a club in Boston called Storyville and launched a half-century of jazz promotion. In plain, if at times serpentine, prose (“I think that even after these short moments I thought that perhaps our lives would become permanently intertwined”), Wein tells of ushering practically every jazz musician alive through Storyville’s doors and bestows a little story upon each: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald (“I developed a blister on my middle finger from snapping to the beat”), Charlie Parker, Lester Young, George Shearing. From these associations he was able to patch together the Newport Jazz Festival, a terrific fusion of art and pop, elusive and foot-tapping that was forever in one form or another of trouble: financial, legal, critical. Wein promoted ferment as much as music; he introduced rock into the jazz festival in 1969 (“Led Zeppelin’s performance was a wall of pure energy”) and electricity into the Newport Folk Festival—another of his brainstorms—in 1965, with Paul Butterfield and Bob Dylan. He managed to infuriate both jazz purists (Nat Hentoff thought Newport was crassly commercial) and folkie diehards: when Dylan launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” Wein writes, “the prevailing feeling among the crowd was a sense that they had been betrayed.” It was also history, and he invites readers to walk along at his side as he made it.
Wein is eye-crossingly voluble, but he does have a lot of stories, perspectives, and music history to get off his chest.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-306-81114-6
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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