I have been asked how someone with my background in an upper middle class, Jewish family (living in a small, conservative New England city built on granite, I might add,) became a jazz writer, historian and biographer -- in essence, a jazz expert. I definitely took a left turn and changed cultures. Perhaps the reason I did it, could do it, wanted to, and had to do it is simply that I followed drummer Art Blakey's advice even before I knew him. Blakey said, "Whatever you are, you be it, and be it all the way, because nothing else is going to work anyway." From childhood, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I soon came to know my talent was a curious blend of my instinctive subjectivity, interest in the world, and acquired objectivity.

Gradually it began to dawn on me in the 1990s that I had become an influential, well-known writer about jazz -- primarily for my biographies, profiles, and jazz histories. I established myself almost accidentally over a period of about two decades, without any intention of concentrating on jazz. But increasingly the editors of the jazz magazines hired me to do pieces, and then I became more engrossed in the subject, studying the history, listening to records, jazz stations, and live performances in clubs. And there was a creative book editor, Jim Landis, at William Morrow, who took a chance on giving me a contract based on three chapters about singers I had written on speculation. I suppose that once I got a firm grasp on the art of speculation, I was able to move forward.

I had always loved to go to clubs, especially a famed piano jazz room, Bradley's, that opened in my Greenwich Village, Manhattan neighborhood in 1969. I went there several nights a week for the music and the good, economical hamburgers. Bradley's became so popular that a few other, fancier restaurants in Greenwich Village instituted piano-bass duos in the 1970s. The idea caught on uptown, too. Then I had an even greater choice of places to go to.

There seemed to be a subtle renaissance of the public's interest in jazz by the late 1970s and certainly in the early 1980s. Clubs were opening and attracting customers. The clubs were prettier, cleaner, with better food, and in safer neighborhoods than most jazz joints in the 1960s and early '70s, when rock music reigned supreme. As rock concerts became dangerous, people looked around for other types of entertainment. Kids turned to videos, and their parents to jazz. Recording companies began reissuing their classic records, and they sold well.

I was a writer who had had a checkered career to say the least. All the while that I had been struggling to become a noted writer, or at least a solvent one, I had always listened to music, particularly jazz. It was really an escape hatch for me, away from my professional and personal stresses.

Once I began writing about jazz, I started meeting all kinds of people -- that is, people from a great variety of backgrounds who had gravitated toward playing, or writing about, or promoting, or recording, or producing jazz. The jazz world was a fascinating little subculture. Musicians were particularly pleasant to me. Not only that, but they loved to talk -- to try to tell the truth about their own lives and the changing world in which they had grown up. And they were charming -- more charming than most other people I had met. For one thing, charm is part of the jazz musician's business. Jazz musicians are not the sort of people who go to cocktail parties and make a study of looking right past other people; no, no, just the opposite. They don't go to cocktail parties much anyway; they go to the bandstands and bars of jazz clubs, or they stay home and talk on the phone and listen to records and the radio. The smart ones, as they grow older, try to get little places in the country or the suburbs to relax in. They even tend to congregate in communities. And they have uncanny memories; they might meet a person once and then remember that person's face and name for a year or more. Their minds are seductive, and they usually have great senses of humor.

Most of the musicians I interviewed were African American, and I started to become familiar with and even inducted, so to speak, into their culture. Gradually I started to cross the cultural line to a degree, learning about and fitting into the jazz world, and I noticed that the white jazz musicians I knew had also crossed that line. I had something in common with a whole, very worthwhile subculture made up of creative people. I felt at home. Musicians never worried that I might try to take a gig from them; they viewed me as someone who might even be able to create an opportunity for them to get exposure. And I think they sensed I was respectful and in awe of their talents.

Originally I had no idea that I would one day write about jazz. I grew up in a small city, Fall River, Mass., which had no jazz club. But it did have a wonderful record store called The Music Box, whose owner, Danny Gittleman, had wide ranging tastes in music. At a time when there was a sharp color line in the record business, and some records were marketed to white communities, and others were race records sold in black communities, Danny bought all kinds of music -- jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, (rock and roll is white, and rhythm and blues is the same kind of music but black) -- in New York and brought it home to sell. On Saturday afternoons I used to go with my girlfriend to the store to listen to records and occasionally buy some.

At home, my father had a large collection of books -- poetry, fiction, philosophy, some first editions, Ellery Queen mystery magazines, a little bit of everything, and there was also a record collection -- a great deal of classical music, and also some pop and jazz records. Somebody in the family had bought an album by pianist and singer Hazel Scott, for example, and pianist Joe Bushkin. We had Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and Nat Cole records, and Ernesto Lecuona, the Cuban bandleader, and Broadway show albums -- a great variety. I once bought a Louis Bellson drum solo, "Skin Deep," on an extended play, 45 rpm record and played it repeatedly in my room. My father often came in and turned it way down, insisting I must be deaf. But he liked music and could sing fairly well himself.

I think I liked rock and roll/rhythm and blues a great deal in the early 1950s. But when I went to college at Columbia in New York in 1956, at age 17, I discovered a late night, jazz radio program on WEVD. It was hosted by Symphony Sid Torin, whose deep, gravelly voice was honed by cigarettes and cognac. He introduced me to music by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, who wrote a plaintive song called "Moanin'" -- and many other musicians, some of whom I remembered for their catchy names as much as for their music -- Junior Mance, for one. I fell in love with Joe Williams's voice on that station. When I had a date who could afford it, I often suggested that he take me to the Embers, a fashionable upper east side restaurant with great roast beef and wonderful jazz groups. If my date couldn't afford a dinner, I settled for a drink at the bar. Somehow I learned about the existence of other jazz clubs in New York at the time and went to Birdland, the Composer, Count Basie's -- so many. Most of my dates were white, occasionally a black or Asian foreign student. I had been taught racial tolerance at home, even though I knew very well that I was not really expected to practice it. But I did, and New York was a big, fascinating city, in which no one could really tell me what to do or wanted to bother checking up on my activities.

Most nights, I simply sat in the dormitory, listened to Sid Torin, and did my work. I majored in creative writing and minored in a social life. After graduation I faced the daunting task of choosing a way to go. I had just published a novel written while I was an undergraduate, and I needed a job. I wanted to write non-fiction at that time and pursued jobs at news organizations. It took me several years to get a job as a writer/researcher at CBS Network Radio News, from which I had the chance to move to The New York Times, a place fraught with politics on the work force. At the Times, I struggled for recognition and muffed some opportunities for security primarily because of my lack of connections compounded by my naivete. (For example, the foreign editor asked me if I would like to go to Indonesia, and I said "no." The idea intimidated me, perhaps because I was aware that when Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the rivers of the country had run with blood and with the bodies of Communists and overseas Chinese.) I ended up as a stringer on regular general assignment, writing about social trends, for the national desk for about four years.

On the side, I wrote a few pieces about music; my best was about La Lupe, a Cuban soul singer, published by New York Magazine; that was a major coup for me. I was excited by her singing on WEVD. Jazz was gone from that station by then, and Latin jazz had replaced it. A couple of million Hispanic New Yorkers knew about La Lupe, and few Anglos did. Having seen that intriguing piece by me, Sy Peck, then editor of the Times's Arts and Leisure section, asked me to write about Joe Cocker, a rock and roller from England. His was not my type of music, and he was a very uncommunicative interviewee, for whatever his reasons or problems at that time. Cocker was a bore, and my piece was not very good.

Suffice to say I groped for a way to go to build a career. Eventually, I met a man who advised me to go to Paris to look for a job. Unable to find one there, I nevertheless fell in love with Paris and began writing about it and selling pieces to the American newspapers. Back in New York, I continued going to jazz clubs and writing pieces about jazz for my own enjoyment. During the second major blackout in town, in the late 1970s, I went to a club and heard a blues harmonica player named Sugar Blue; his soulful laments brought a great number of people through that sultry, dark night. I followed him the next week to the Tin Palace, a jazz club on the Bowery, wrote about him, and found a Johnson Publication magazine, Black Stars, to buy the story for $100. But I had to supply a photograph or lose the opportunity.

I called the Village Voice, where an editor referred me to a photographer, Ray Ross. "Ask him," said the Voice editor. "If he doesn't have a photo, nobody does."

Ray showed up to meet me with a few excellent photos in a bar near my apartment house. A white man, he was dressed in simple, bohemian style, with a long scraggly beard and matted dreadlocks, but his eyes were sparkling and full of vitality. He said, "Do you have any more stories on music you want to sell?" I said, "Yes, but I don't know where to send them." He told me the names of several editors at music magazines I had never heard of. Sure enough, they bought my pieces. Ray supplied the photos for them. He began guiding me to jazz world events.

By then it was 1978. I didn't play an instrument and knew so little about jazz that I'm amazed now how I could have written about it, but editors bought my work. Looking back at those stories, I realize I was very good at asking musicians what I had to know to write about them, and I loved their music. I think the time was becoming ripe for new jazz writers to emerge. And I had absolutely no hangups or worries about being a woman writing about jazz -- or anything else. The one thing I did worry about, as editors took more of my music writing, was that I would one day run out of subjects. The old legends such as Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan were growing older. So many important musicians had already died. I feared I would outlive my specialty.

But I was kept so busy writing about it that I didn't have time to worry constantly or pursue another specialty. Gradually my social trends, general interest, and travel writing assignments fell off because I didn't have time for them, and my connections in the jazz world -- both professional and personal -- kept widening. My life became stable -- at least in the moment, provided I didn't think about the future. Becoming a jazz book junkie, I gradually learned about jazz and African American history and plain old American history.

It was not easy to become a jazz expert or writer, since the art of jazz is so abstract -- and as the late tenor saxophonist, Clifford Jordan called it, "a secret music," but somehow I did it. There were discouragements -- but there were fewer outright scams and political hurdles in the jazz publishing world than in the rest of publishing -- or so it seemed to me. I had to work for weeks and months to get one good assignment and never found a clear way into the women's magazine world, except for a piece here and there -- (one editor at Vogue wanted to buy an article from me for $200, with my name excluded) -- until a jazz musician opened a door for me; one of his biggest fans owned McCall's. And I didn't know that a major intellectual magazine had a policy of not using women writers. Such pitfalls abounded. Furthermore I was not a raving beauty or a legendary sophisticate who could socialize her way into the limelight. Editors in the jazz world, however, were somewhat open to giving newcomers a chance. Fees weren't high. Sometimes they were laughably low.

I was always broke, living in a small studio, unmarried then -- that's another story -- and working a full - time job at Cooper Union. I turned it into a half time job, then was forced out when I refused to go back full time. Enough assignments came in to keep me going. My parents slipped me some money.

My father died in December, 1981. He left me $20,000 in insurance policies, and there was a little other money that resulted from a settlement of his estate. It was a big boost for my career, for it kept me going until February, 1982, when I received my first jazz book contract. I spent more than the advance to complete the book, going to England, for example, just to interview Annie Ross of the Lambert Hendricks & Ross bebop singing trio. My book, which I called "Louis's Children," in honor of Louis Armstrong and the influence of his singing style, got heartening reviews. Leonard Feather, the eminent Los Angeles Times critic who gave it an excellent notice, said that the book on jazz singing history filled a need, a void. Perhaps that was a great deal of the reason for my incipient success. The jazz world needed more writers. The field -- both the music and the related industries in the early 1980s -- was burgeoning. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis had become a star, and his success was creating opportunities for countless other young musicians.

I chose not to concentrate on criticism; that was not my forte then. I had experienced a belly full of it in my life, and I preferred not to seek out assignments blatantly based on critical judgment. I might choose to write about a musician because I liked his work. That in itself was an act of critical judgment. But it was subtle, and I didn't run the risk of ruining the life or hurting the feelings of those good musicians who might have been having a bad night or even a bad year. As for any musicians whom I might think were bad for one reason or another -- perhaps they played out of tune consistently, or they had a terrible tone -- I simply avoided them.

My family -- which is to say my mother and her sister, who considered their small, Jewish communities in New England to be the center of the universe -- were puzzled by my career and its development. They didn't know what I was doing out here. But I was interested in the world and stayed my course. And I had the energy to work hard -- to seek out a lot of work and complete it on deadlines. I also came up with ideas and worked on them, even though I had no market place for them. Sometimes one developed as if by its own momentum -- for example my book, "Madame Jazz," on contemporary women jazz instrumentalists, published by Oxford University Press. I had noticed the growing number of impressive women players years before the idea was accepted in the publishing world.

And for a long time I had the patience to deal with a great variety of editors. It didn't matter to me if they were friendly or curmudgeonly -- I kept my mouth shut with the latter, though of course I preferred the pleasant ones. When I couldn't get along with an editor, I quietly moved on. I knew I had arrived -- in prestige, not in economic stability -- when countless people in jazz clubs recognized me and tried to get me interested in their work, so that I would write about them; when my mail box overflowed with publicity handouts and compact disks; when people began quoting me; when people began talking to me in a deferential manner; and when a former editor of mine at a magazine appropriated one of my ideas (about "the lost generation of jazz musicians" who struggled along during rock's heyday,) tried to get a grant with it, and asked me to write a recommendation for him! I never mentioned the source of his idea to him.

And the merry-go-round kept circling. So a love for jazz and a passion for writing became focused and matured into a lifestyle and a metier.

Copyright © 1999 Leslie Gourse.