Customer Reviews

The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir

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I loved Parisian Jazz Chronicles. Very sorry to have found out about MZ's death in the past month. What a guy! Plenty Renaissance for me. I found a copy in a remainder bin on a neighbourhood walk in Vancouver BC. To hear from a real jazz man, dedicated lifelong player, great writer, Birth of the Cool band alumnus etc with such a communicative genius, hanging himself out to dry as required for honesty's sake. Tough with you, tough with me, romantic, fair, I love that. Hipster pretensions not always where you'd expect them to be located. One of my favourite lives. Sorry not to have encountered him earlier on, made some time.

Ken Lutes

Put this on your holiday gift list for the jazz fan who has everything - or who thinks he or she knows everything. This is not, as might be expected, a collection of Zwerin's columns for The International Herald Tribune, though that would have been a fine thing, too. This is, rather, a collection of riffs improvised out in the margins of those columns: what the interview subjects were really like, what was going on in the author's life, the vagaries of travelling around Europe in search of true jazz, the real thing, an authentic self. Lyrically written, it swings.

Zwerin is no doubt an interesting cat -- not unlike David Amram -- deeply invested in a complicated past -- musician on the Birth of the Cool sessions -- expat in Paris & invaluable jazz columnist for the international Herald Tribune (the rag Jean Seberg peddled in 'Breathless') -- his cut & paste memoirs are so coy & cloying that this reader had to aggressivley cut through the grease to the scattered gems & direct-hits -- sketchy & self-lathering, these episodes can't quite reach beyond the vanity press ka ka -- the lingering odor of vanity w/ slithery insights & veritas are deeply bogged down by hep hip narrative-- Zwerin's book on the jazz scene in wartime Paris is much more sustained & useful -- check it out --