Living with jazz

There's a nice review by Alfred Appel Jr of Dan Morgenstern's Living With Jazz:

[Morgenstern] writes with particular warmth and acuity about musicians like Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell and Milt Hinton. He is both lyrical and critically persuasive on Lester Young, arguing against prevailing negative opinion in favor of Young's late recordings, his personal travails notwithstanding.

The opening section, ''Armstrong and Ellington,'' is the book's strongest. Eleven essays, written over many years, cohere to form a first-rate survey of Ellington's career. The eight reviews and essays on Armstrong collectively reveal that no one has written better or more lovingly about Satchmo. Morgenstern's 1994 essay ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' actually covers Armstrong's entire lifetime and is the best short introduction to the man who, he writes, ''spread love, happiness and beauty.'' Morgenstern's laser-beam memory locates musical sources for the bebop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in Armstrong recordings from 1929. As Miles Davis said, ''You can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played - even modern.''
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''Thanks a Million,'' Armstrong sang in 1935, wearing his heart on his sleeve, which is why we turn to jazz, why we need it.