The jazzmen : how Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie transformed America / Larry Tye.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz--Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie--who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom. William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans--the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.

What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America's eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country's most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface: A Road Map (ix)
• Jazzmen Chronology (xv)
• Author's Note (xix)
• Part I Setting The Stage
• 1 Satchmo's Battlefield (3)
• 2 The Count's Shrouded Roots in Red Bank (17)
• 3 Duke's Capital Experience (24)
• Part II Musical Lives
• 4 Nightspots (37)
• 5 Life on the Rocky Road (62)
• 6 Getting There (73)
• 7 Setting the Themes (84)
• 8 The Language of Jazz (93)
• 9 On Center Stage (99)
• Part III It's An Ensemble
• 10 The Sidemen (115)
• 11 Side Women (130)
• 12 Managers and Mobsters (139)
• 13 Critical Audiences and Professional Critics (159)
• Part IV Offstage
• 14 Family Unfriendly (169)
• 15 Mistresses and Misogyny (186)
• 16 Keeping the Faith (198)
• 17 Cravings and Dependencies (204)
• 18 Toilet Truths, Food Fetishes, and Other Medical Matters (216)
• 19 Follow the Money (227)
• Part V Race Matters
• 20 Artists and Entertainers (237)
• 21 Resetting the Themes (247)
• 22 Breakthrough Battles (257)
• 23 Overseas Ambassadors (273)
• Part VI Last Acts
• 24 Long-Lived (289)
• 25 Last Days and Lasting Memories (303)
• Epilogue: Legacies (315)
• Acknowledgments (319)
• Notes (323)
• Bibliography (349)
• Index (383)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

One might have thought that there wasn't much left to say about jazz's holy trinity, but Tye's thematic discursions on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie have a fresh perspective and different angles. He draws on his previous works--including Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon--for some lenses through which he views these three men who've had a profound influence on American music and culture. The chapters navigating their travels through the American South (especially in Pullman cars) and contributions to the civil rights era are incredibly vivid. The thematic arrangement of the chapters and side-by-side comparisons of how each man navigated everything from racism to romance to the recording industry seem especially suitable for a book that is, after all, about jazz. It also makes each artist all the more distinctive compared to his peers. VERDICT A refreshing and attentive suite of composite portraits for jazz fans and readers interested in the intersection of art, culture, and politics in the 20th-century United States.--Genevieve Williams

Publishers Weekly Review

Biographer Tye (Bobby Kennedy) presents a mesmerizing group portrait of American jazz greats Duke Ellington (1899--1974), Louis Armstrong (1901--1971), and Count Basie (1904--1984). Tracing each man's influential career, Tye captures their intense work ethic and rigorous travel schedules (Armstrong alone averaged 300 nights on the road per year), their music's deep gospel roots, and their artistic styles and gifts (Ellington and Basie flourished as conductors, while Armstrong thrived by communing with a live audience). Yet Tye's main focus lies in how his subjects changed American culture at large: even as Armstrong, Ellington, and Basie endured the indignities of touring during the Jim Crow era, they brought alive in their music the "invisible stories of Black America." In doing so, Tye contends, the jazz legends opened "white America's ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities" and "the virtues of Black artistry," and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. With scrupulous attention to detail, Tye brings his subjects to life as both forces of social change and three-dimensional human beings who lived and breathed their art, from Ellington's soulful, "Shakespearian" arrangements to Armstrong's "heart as big as Earth" and Basie's "Buddha-like" temperament. It's a vibrant ode to a legendary trio and the "rip-roaring harmonies" that made them great. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams. (May)

Booklist Review

Although many books have been written about these iconic jazz artists, Tye (Demagogue, 2020) insists that "we don't know any of the three. Not really." Duke Ellington was the grandson of slaves. Louis Armstrong was raised by his grandmother, his great-grandmother, and a family of Lithuanian Jews. Count Basie dreamed of a world outside the one he was raised in and, with the help of pianist Fats Waller, was able to find it. Different in temperament, the three jazzmen made a collective impact, "elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom" even as they faced racial discrimination in Jim Crow America. None of these men were saints ("Not even close," Tye writes), but what matters is that "[t]hey gave us songs that were the ideal remedies for the blues of everyday life." In Tye's estimation, Ellington was "Shakespearean"; Armstrong, "the Mark Twain of song"; and Basie a "musical everyman." With descriptions of such key venues as Ellington's Cotton Club in Harlem, Basie's Reno Club in Kansas City, and Armstrong's Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Tye incisively portrays three seminal American artists.

Kirkus Book Review

An examination of the lives of three kings of jazz and their impact on American society. Tye, the bestselling author of biographies of Satchel Paige, Joseph McCarthy, and others, embarks on his first voyage into music history. In a single volume, he has essentially produced fairly substantial biographies of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, contemporaries who became three of the most decorated and celebrated musicians in American history. The author capably delineates their struggles with, and impact on, the often harrowing and sometimes violent complexities and shifting dynamics of American race relations during the first half of the 20th century. The most striking aspect of the book is the astonishing amount of research Tye conducted, the sometimes overwhelming yield of which clears up myths that the golden trio themselves often perpetuated regarding their upbringings, their turbulent personal lives, and the technical evolution of their music. The author takes a fascinating look at the religious backgrounds and beliefs of Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington, who were the most prominent frontmen of the music that fanatics and public figures long blamed and targeted for societal degradation. Tye also explores the friendly but fierce professional rivalry among the three. The author's vivid style brings readers front and center into the myriad of clubs and studios where Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington played, as well as the social vibe of the cities and towns where their music left an indelible mark. This thoroughly enjoyable musical journey is succinctly titled, yet the scope of Tye's research demonstrates why and how Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington transcended jazz and even music itself to establish themselves in American culture forevermore in words that a young Ellington employed to describe himself: "beyond category." For Ellington, "it wasn't a contradiction to be an artist as well as a showman." A delightful read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.