From Portland to Dorsey, new jazz books are jumpin'

New and worthy books on jazz include a history of the Portland jazz scene, the story of the saxophone, a biography of Tommy Dorsey and a memoir by a Paris-based music journalist:

"Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz 1942-1957," by Robert Dietsche (OregonStateUniversityPress,229pp.,$24.95). This lively, long-awaited history of the jazz scene in Portland's "Little Harlem" on Williams Avenue is a colorful read and a nice complement to "Jackson Street After Hours," the Seattle jazz history (now out of print) I wrote in 1993.

Author Robert Dietsche is a deejay who used to own the popular Portland store Django Records. Drawn largely from oral histories with musicians as well as characters on the scene, "Jumptown" features a handy reference map and "Who's Who" list of the neighborhood, plus vintage photographs; a bibliography; discography; endnotes; and a useful afterword by Portland jazz writer Lynn Darroch, which swiftly carries the story into the present.

"Jumptown" paints a picture of a semi-segregated era when miscegenation was illegal, racially mixed couples were unwelcome, jitterbugging was banned at one high school as "too black" and touring black musicians were barred from whites-only hotels. You'll meet tenor saxophonist Kenny Hing, pianist Tommy Todd and alto saxophonist George Lawson. You'll be introduced to Pat Patterson, owner of the Dude Ranch jazz club; dancer Tate Bay ("a wall-eyed, five-by-five man with a club foot"); and Ed Slaughter, the "honorary mayor of Williams Avenue," whose jukebox at the Savoy Billiard Parlor educated a generation of Portland jazzers.

"Jumptown" has some problems. Its unusual organizational framework — by nightclub — creates a frustrating kaleidoscope of names, places and dates from which it is virtually impossible to construct a coherent narrative, not to mention evaluate who is important or even, in some cases, who is from Portland. Accuracy is an issue as well. There are misspelled names (Jabo Ward, Marshal Royal), misattributed musical passages (Dick Wilson's solo on "Lotta Sax Appeal") and endnotes that lead nowhere. One quote, attributed to "Jackson Street," does not appear in the book, though it sounds like something I might have said in conversation.

Nevertheless, this genuine labor of love has lots of new information and is a welcome addition to local jazz literature.

"Tommy Dorsey: Livin' in a Great Big Way," by Peter J. Levinson (DaCapo,354pp.,$27.50).During his remarkable career, Tommy Dorsey landed 286 records on the Billboard pop charts, including 17 No. 1 hits. He sold 110 million records — among them "Song of India," "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" and "Marie." His sweet tone set the standard for trombonists for decades (particularly on ballads); he introduced Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to the world; and he hired some of the best jazz sidemen, including Bunny Berigan, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich and Ziggy Elman.

This biography by big-band specialist Peter Levinson integrates personal, musical and social material, offering as intimate and accurate a portrait of this private, fastidious, exacting — and often sadistic — pop star as we'll ever get.

Levinson recounts Dorsey's hard-scrabble years in the Shenandoah, Pa., coal country, growing up with a demanding, music-teacher father; his early success in the 1920s with co-leader and brother Jimmy Dorsey; their famously stormy fights and eventual break-up in 1935; Tommy Dorsey's breakthrough in New York, in 1937; and his eventual reunion with Jimmy on the Jackie Gleason TV show in the 1950s.

One of the most deeply fascinating sections deals with Sinatra, who, Levinson claims rather convincingly, modeled his big-shot public persona not just on mobsters, but on Dorsey himself, whose personality Levinson sums up as "calculation, opportunism, ruthlessness." Buddy Rich apparently followed suit.

Levinson is a publicist by trade, so he's full of great stories, such as how the Glenn Miller hit "Moonlight Serenade" was rejected by Dorsey because it originally had a poor lyric. Levinson is also addicted to sales and income figures (they were huge) and other hyperbole better suited to press releases than serious biography. But, overall, this is a serious and sympathetic window into the life of one of the most fascinating and important band leaders in American popular music.

"The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool," by Michael Segell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $25).

This delightful, often amusing book about an instrument once described by Debussy as "aquatic" recalls those essays John McPhee used to write for The New Yorker about something you had no particular interest in but couldn't stop reading about. A bastard brass/reed instrument designed for military bands in the 19th century that found its true métier in jazz in the 20th, the saxophone was designed by the grandiose Adolphe Sax, who patented the instrument in 1846. He once found a bomb planted under his bed by a competitor.

With disarming intermissions describing his own, first-person struggles with the instrument as a player, Segell takes us on a sax-o-rama tour. It includes a comic "battle of the bands" in Paris; Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore's American wind band (a precursor to Sousa); the Purdue marching band; the aggressive sales of band instruments by the Conn company, which virtually created American music education; the Brown Brothers' vaudeville act, which popularized the instrument in the nineteen-teens; the rise of the dance-band sax section, with Art Hickman; a history of jazz sax soloing ; and an examination of intense rivalry between classical-music sax men Sigurd Rascher and Marcel Mule.

Throughout, the unifying thread is the irrational association of the sax with sex, which persists even today, as every bedroom scene in the movies is introduced by a scooping alto. There are no endnotes, and a section on advanced techniques inexplicably ignores Anthony Braxton. But this is a terrific read.

"The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir," by Mike Zwerin (Yale University Pres, 240 pp., $26).

They don't make jazz writers like Mike Zwerin anymore. Conversational, hip, musically trained and possessed of perfect pitch and impeccable timing as a writer, Zwerin has published a music column in the International Herald Tribune in Paris since 1979. A veteran of the Miles Davis Nonet, former trombonist Zwerin is a classic refusé, the expatriate son of an American millionaire who said "no" to the family business and "yes" to the sardonic skepticism of the beat era.

In this memoir, written in the third person with musical "interludes," Zwerin mingles details of his personal life — women, drugs, money — with music journalism and somehow pulls it off, mostly by not taking himself too seriously. The piece on Kenny G — a parody of Gorelick's "aw-shucks-if-it-sells-it-must-be-good" tone — is priceless. Somehow, Zwerin goads performers into telling him their secrets, such as the time Count Basie scolded him for being negative: "All down through my life, no matter what went wrong, I always felt all right," says the band leader.

No bebop purist, Zwerin has changed with the times, so there are chapters on Bob Dylan, Brad Mehldau and Paul Simon as well as Wayne Shorter and Dexter Gordon. Great stuff.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com