Buddy Bolden and band - or is it?

Ah, lists! Don’t you just love them. Especially when they involve books you should read. Or jazz. Or both!

There’s a fascinating list on the Guardian website today, courtesy of writer Reggie Nadelson. I had read her journalism before but hadn’t realised she had also worked her love of jazz into her crime series about NYC detective Artie Cohen. So those books will be going on my “must-read” list immediately.

And she chooses some of my favourites in her Top 10 Jazz Books list, too.

Like Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, in which he creates a fictional portrait of the trumpeter Buddy Bolden from one old photograph which may or may not be him, and other scraps of information which could be factual or apocryphal – we’ll never know. But I like to think the biography Ondaajte gives us is pretty accurate. In fact, in my mind it has become the life of Buddy Bolden. And who can contradict me?

I also once drove half way across the country to see Mike Westbrook’s imaginative jazz opera inspired by Ondaatje’s novel. It was superb, as I recall, but, like so much that Westbrook has done, seems to have sunk into obscurity. Why is Westbrook so dreadfully under-appreciated in this country?

Jazz, by Toni Morrison, is in the list, too. Reggie says “it’s difficul to choose great fiction about jazz because so many writers try to invent a prose that somehow mimics the music, an almost impossible feat”. This, it seems to me, is just one of the things Morrison does beautifully. As Nadelson acknowledges: “Morrison is one of the few authors who can really make her prose swing.”

Also on the list is one of the finest jazz biographies I know, David Hadju’s loving and extraordinarily thorough book about Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life. What an amazing man: iconoclastic, hugely brave, and with an unquenchable spirit for living.

And then, of course, there is the peerless jazz journalism of Whitney Balliett, jazz writer for the New Yorker for oh so many years. His one-volume Collected Works goes from 1954 to 2001. I remember back in the late ’70s anxiously checking each new copy of the New Yorker to come to the public library in South Africa where I was working, to see if this week there would be a Balliett jazz piece, in addition to the superb cinema reviews of Pauline Kael.

One, I remember especially, described a Keith Jarrett solo piano improvisation so well I could almost hear the music as I read.

There are others in Reggie Nadelson’s Top 10 I am not familiar with, so must also add those to my reading list. But there are two glaring omissions, as well, as far as I am concerned.

One is my favourite ever book about jazz, Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, in which he paints portraits of various jazz greats, including Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk, in a highly insightful kind of fiction fed by thorough factual research. There is also a nifty linking riff in which Duke Ellington is driving overnight to the next gig.

Here he is talking about how he wrote But Beautiful (and two of his other books, too):

The other is Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home, which grew out of a series of opening chapters published in the US monthly Musician, back probably in the early ’80s. This novel features a dancing bear by day who, once night falls, is a mean alto saxophonist with a wicked sense of humour. He sits in with many of the real jazz players of the day, which gives added spice to what is already an absorbing story about the jazz musician as social outsider.

To read Reggie’s pick in the Guardian go here. And if you have a favourite jazz book, let me know with a Comment below.