Selections From the Gutter - Portraits from the JAZZ RECORD, edited by Art Hodes. and Chadwick Hansen.
University of California Press Berkeley. 1978 First Paperback Edition. First published in 1977
Trade Paperback, 233 pages. ISBN: 0520037197. Weight: 1 lb, 1 oz.
Good used condition. No tears. Both front and back covers have minor creases and fraying corners
Front page is signed by Art Hodes, inscribed to Peter Bullis who was banjoist and a founding member of the New Black Eagle Jazz Band until his death a few years ago. A color photo is pasted beneath the autograph showing both Art and Peter. Also, on the dedication page is pasted a color photo of Art Hodes at the keyboard.
"Art Hodes/Music Man: so reads the business card handed out by the tall pianist. And 'music man' he has been ever since he learned to play 'two-fisted' piano as a kid on Chicago's South Side. One of the great band pianists, Art Hodes has known and played with all the top names in jazz. In the mid 'forties, after a successful stint on a radio (WNYC, New York's municipal radio station), he began a magazine called 'The Jazz Record.' Hodes persuaded many of his friends to come to his office and dictate autobiographical articles. The result is an important body of oral history, the best of which, gathered in the present volume, forms an impressive composite portrait of the mid-century jazz musician...." - uncredited review
"Most jazz players have to let their recordings speak for themselves (if they have made any). Art Hodes had the distinction of being known in two ways--as a more than competent New Orleans/Chicago-type pianist and as the editor and chief interviewer of the short-lived publication The Jazz Record. This book selects choice excerpts from his column for that magazine, "The Gutter", which got its name from the portion of a record close to the center, after the music has finished playing. Often you will disagree with Hodes, but you can't doubt his sincerity and his commitment to the early style of jazz that he had always played (he began his career in the 1920s, when jazz was just starting its rise)."--JMichael J. Fawcett, Amazon
"Legendary, hitherto ""inarticulate"" jazz musicians flowed out their truth for four years (1943-1947) into the pages of The Jazz Record--via the coaxing of two-fisted piano-man/raconteur/editor Art Hodes and the speed-typing of co-editor Dale Curran. So here--in addition to Hodes' own jivey reminiscences of Chicago's fertile South Side, surveys of New Orleans beginnings by John A. Provenzano, and portraits of sidemen and soloing stars by such polished pens as Alma Hubner, Carl Van Vechten, and Robert Alan Aurthur--are the voices (perhaps a bit too cleaned up and evened out) of the music-makers themselves: Cow Cow Davenport, ""Big Bill"" Broonzy, Warren ""Baby"" Dodds, Pops Foster, George Lewis. . . and Satchmo (""I'm telling you, I usta really chirp"") in a highly endearing interview. Abetted by Hodes' anecdotal headnotes and backed up by pieces on disc-making hassles and other cultist paraphernalia, this jam session of profiles and full-faces scats along into a literary-oral history of jazz fathers and their first-generation descendants."--Kirkus Reviews
"any fan who enjoys reading first-person articles about jazz will want this book "--Rj H, Amazon