That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part III: The Beat Goes On: Jazz Appreciation 101
Keeping the Conversation
Flowing with Jazz Talk
Music and decorations set the mood for your jazz party, but you can also take
an active role in prompting and sustaining good conversation. Some of your
guests may already know a lot about jazz, while others may be complete newbies.
Armed with a few facts and anecdotes from jazz history, you can help
make sure the conversation is entertaining, lively, and built on jazz. In the following
sections, I explain how to dig up interesting stories to tell to your
guests and provide you with some details about lesser-known musicians.
Finding nuggets of info to
share with your guests
Stories about players, odd factoids, unsung heroes, insider slang — you can
store all sorts of items from books (such those in Appendix C) or online
sources in your head and drop them into the conversation.
The Red Hot Jazz Archive (www.redhotjazz.com) is a definitive online
source of information about jazz before 1930. You may be amazed how many
important players there were, how many great stories there are about those
players and their music, and how much you can discover about who played
with whom. This first-rate Web site compiled by jazz fanatics gives general
history, as well as individual biographies and discographies (lists of recordings)
for dozens of famous and not-so-famous players, ranging from Louis
Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton to Bunk Johnson, Freddie Keppard, and
Clarence Williams. After an hour or two touring this Web site, you know
enough to share a bit with your dinner guests.
One trick I often use at parties is to keep a laptop computer with wireless
Internet connection at hand. That way, when the conversation raises questions,
you can come up with intriguing (and accurate) answers within a few seconds.
Dishing about lesser-known musicians
For every Louis Armstrong or Lester Young or Charlie Parker, there’s a Bix
Beiderbecke, Chu Berry, or Lucky Thompson who was a gifted unsung hero
of his time. In fact, you can tell an alternate history of jazz using only unfamiliar
favorites, and that history might be more compelling than the familiar
version (see Part II for a quick overview). But then, I’ve always been a fan
of the underdog, an advocate of artists who made a valiant effort but never
achieved immortality. So, in the following sections, I present a few of those
deserving musicians from jazz history.