Trumpet Blues; The Life of Harry James, by Peter J Levinson, Oxford, pp 334, £20 in UK.
Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter, by Nick Catalano. Oxford, pp 208, £17.99 in UK.
Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, edited by Thomas Brothers, Oxford, pp 255, £17.99 in UK.
Among jazz trumpeters Armstrong was a genius and James a great instrumentalist. Brown came somewhere between the two. In part, perhaps, that explains why Armstrong has had so many books devoted to him and the others none. Until now, that is. Levinson's and Catalano's biographies are the first ever written about the lengthy life of swing era pop icon James and the trail-blazing Brown, whose time in the jazz sun was all too brief.
Levinson's is by far the best of the three books, an unfortunate circumstance because James emerges from this exhaustive scrutiny as not a nice man. Born into a circus background, with a demanding father, he grew up self-centred and emotionally constipated, apparently able to do justice to his feelings only through his trumpet. And that took him, through Benny Goodman's band, into bandleader status of his own, two failed marriages - one to Betty Grable, the Allied Forces' number one pin-up of the second World War - and a pursuit of sex that would exhaust an army of satyrs.
His main topic of conversation, apart from music, was baseball; his main addiction, apart from sex and alcohol, was gambling. Put those together with a lifetime on the road as a touring musician and it's small wonder he was so thoroughly handicapped in the marital stakes. And fatherhood? Another disaster area. It's tempting to see in the constant travelling, therefore, as much an emotional necessity as a financial one. He needed to get away from himself and, failing that, the anodynes of sex, drink and gambling had to suffice.
Levinson writes well, with an insider's view of the business as a publicist, and background research buttressed by over 200 interviews. His grasp of the subject and ability to conjure up the ambience of an era are undeniable. Even if, finally, the book may be everything you never wanted to know about Harry James and were not interested enough to ask, it's surely the definitive word on the subject. That will be more than enough for the fans.
Clifford Brown was in almost every way the antithesis of James. A decent, clean-living, serious and gifted musician who helped conceptually expand the trumpet in jazz, he was much loved by virtually everyone who knew him. Born into a large, close-knit black family in Wilmington, Delaware in 1930, he had, by his early 20s, become the main challenge to Dizzy Gillespie's supremacy in then modern jazz, eclipsing Miles Davis and everyone else.
In recordings between 1953 and 1956, he rewrote the book on jazz trumpet with a series of dazzling performances with the quintet he co-led with drummer Max Roach, thrusting himself into the front rank of the music. He seemed set for a long and productive career until, on his wife's birthday and their second wedding anniversary, he was killed in a car crash a few months short of 26 years of age. His wife, left with a son and memories of a remarkable partner, never remarried.
His death remains, even now, a grievous loss, of which Catalano's book, for all its shortcomings, is a touching reminder. A university professor, he's no more than competent as a writer and his attempts to address Brown's musical legacy are descriptive rather than analytical, hardly probing beneath the surface. Moreover, the grasp of social setting and the gift for making it come alive that suffuse Levinson's book are hardly evident here, despite the work Catalano has clearly put into it. It is, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, not done well, but one is grateful it has been done at all.
And Armstrong? As the subtitle suggests, this is culled from his own written words - letters, biographical musings, magazine articles and the like, some previously unpublished. The personality that emerges is, like the man in Laurence Berggreen's definitive biography of a couple of years ago, simple, wise, generous and utterly lovable. He was also totally without pretension, colour-blind in the face of racism, and willing to believe the best of people without being naive.
But as a writer? With a trumpet to his lips, he was a genius; with a pen or typewriter, however, it was a case of stick to the night job. Important as some might feel to have this selection gathered together, it's at best something to dip into occasionally. Ultimately, goodness is less interesting than its opposite; in jazz, as elsewhere, the devil almost always has the best tunes.
Ray Comiskey is an Irish Times journalist.