Customer Reviews

Buck Clayton's Jazz World

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Great book, the best autobiography of a musician I've ever read, and one of the best by anyone, period--Buck Clayton tells story after funny story after poignant (and funny, and enlightening) story--this book's a delight to read. I say that because it's true (and not only because I grew up across the alley from the old Clayton homestead in Parsons, Kansas; Buck's mother used to cut my mom's hair and I'd tag along when I was three or four, not knowing that, really, 2313 Grand could be thought of as a shrine to a great musician who'd long-since left town and made his way to fame). True, the jazz-fan reader will especially love this once Buck returns to California (after an adventure riding boxcars west, he'd returned home to graduate high school) and begins his climb to success--the names of great jazzers fall like spring rain. But Parsonians will truly cherish the long first chapter, in which Buck recounts his adventures and exploits growing up--it's a mini-history of life for a young black man in the early twentieth century in a small Kansas town (not far from Ft. Scott, and Gordon Parks's great book "The Learning Tree") and his eye for detail (and, of course, his splendid storytelling) brings back a lost world. Few will know that W.E.B. Dubois came to Parsons--and stayed with the Claytons--to organize supporters and make speeches in southeast Kansas; I sure didn't, but it's all here, all this and much, much more, beautifully told.

Buck Clayton shows himself to be a most articulate musician, covering his life and times from the midwest to California to China. His period with Count Basie was, of course, the most important part of his career, and one wishes that Clayton had written more incisively about that time. But, he writes so well that the book is always entertaining, up to and including his later years when he was forced to play Dixieland music in order to work.