An Autobiography of Black Jazz [Hardcover]

Dempsey J. Travis (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 543 pages
• Publisher: Academy Chicago Pub; 1st edition (November 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0941484033
• ISBN-13: 978-0941484039
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,035,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Autobiography of Black Jazz, February 14, 2006

By 

Arnett Howard "King Creole" (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Autobiography of Black Jazz (Hardcover)

I am a voracious lover of music hstory and this book has it. Chicago was the recording center during the 1920s, home to King Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Paul Whiteman, Bix Biederbeck, Benny Goodman, the Austin High Gang, plenty of refugees from New Orleans.
Dempsey Travis was a child in Chicago during this golden age, growing up in the mean Southside and skipping school to go to the theaters that featured the great bands. A pianist, he was fronting his own orchestra before he was old enough to be a union member.
The biographers of the jazz age are generally people looking from the outside in. Not Travis, a successful businessman and survivor of every era of music. His memories include rubbing shoulders with Nat Cole, before he became a king, Nancy Wilson's growth years in the 1960s, Gene Ammons, Riley Blues Boy King and the tens of thousands of players who made the show business game with the tough audiences on the Southside.
His rememberances of the owners of the clubs and theaters are as colorful as the entertainers. This book will hit you deep in your soul. I have read all the classic jazz history biographies and this one put me closer to the action that anything else.
Travis also has a biography on Red Foxx which didn't move me near as much as An Autobiography of Black Jazz. Two thumbs up.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Stars of Yesteryear, August 27, 2006

By 

Betty Burks "Betty Burks" (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Autobiography of Black Jazz (Paperback)

Europeans love blacks who play jazz. Dorothy Donegan born in Chicago in 1922 said, "They want us to do jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie. They are crazy about musicians like Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King. They prefer them to Billy Eckstine and Johnny Hartmann." She tells of befriending a washroom attendant named Ruth Jones who later became the singer Dinah Washington. She also knew Erroll Garner who had a good version of "Play Misty For Me."

Studs Terkel wrote in the Introduction: "The bandstand at the Harlem Cotton Club" was a replica of a Southern mansion with large white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters. The orchestra performed in front of the large double doors to the mansion. Down four steps was the dance floor, which was also used for floor shows. The waiters were dressed in red tuxedos, like butlers in a Southern mansion. The entire scene created a 'Gone With the Wind' amosphere that made every male feel like Rhett Butler and every woman Scarlet O'Hara. Since the waiters were paid only one dollar a night, they had to hustle like Rochester and hope that Rhett Butler would leave a big tip." I was waiting for a bus at the mall a few months ago when I overheard a conversation of a couple and the male had just been hired to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant there. He pointed at me and said, "I'll get big tips from people like her." I had a friend for many years, Vivian Sims, who regaled me with her personal experiences at the Cotton Club near where her mother owned some apartments. She had a ball there during her twenties, she said, before coming South to the black Harvard, Fisk University, where one of my sons taught for five years.

Today I went to see a movie I expected to showcase some jazz as it was touted as being a musical about the probition period. It was anything but jazz. About a piano-playing mortician who hauled around bootleg liquor in shiny wood caskets and Ace who dressed in overalls. All of their meetings were in that club where the dancing was amateurish and the music bad. There was language we don't normally hear and some nudity in the acts. It was so upsetting that I had to get up and leave. Not since 'Better Luck Tomorrow' in 2003 have I had such revulsion to what I was seeing on the screen.

The author was a Deejay in Chicago who knew and had his picture taken with all the jazz performers who came to the Windy City. He admired some of the men like Joe Williams, Cab Calloway, and Erskine Hawkins, but he especially like the ladies Nancy Wilson, Pearl Bailey and Sarah Vaughan. He had memorable meetings at the Vendome Theater and the Regal which had a hugh neon sign on top of the large speakeasy palace there in Chicago.