Across a series of portraits and essays, Gene Lees moves through figures including Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Frank Rosolino, Bill Evans, Billy Taylor and Art Farmer, combining biography, anecdote, interview and musical observation.

It's a history of jazz told through temperament as much as technique. Lees goes deep into the skill and history of improvisation, the almost absurd amount of instinct, memory and physical control required to create something coherently in real time — but also on the less romantic stuff around it. There's a lot of money, reputation, exploitation, touring, rivalry, commercial pressure and precarious lives, so the individual profiles become a larger argument about what happens when an art built on spontaneity and intimacy has to survive inside an industry.

Oxford University Press, New York, 1990. First OUP paperback edition; first published 1988. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with mild edge and corner wear. Pages lightly age-toned but clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.