Jazz People

by Val Wilmer

Valerie Wilmer's 1970 classic, Jazz People, has long been considered one of the three or four finest books ever written on jazz. Featuring extensive interviews with fourteen jazz geniuses, including Art Farmer, Cecil Taylor, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Big Joe Turner, and Archie Shepp, Wilmer captures the essential qualities of each artist in her interviews, providing deeply moving portraits--in words and in photographs--of the often troubling lives of the musicians who changed the shape of jazz in the fifties and sixties.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Jazz

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.

Reviews

[Markus Svensson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, quick snapshots of a diverse bunch of jazz people, trying to make sense of the music culture they’re in. Wilmer has a fantastic way of saying a lot with understated means!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilmer's book is an anecdotal look at the jazz scene in the late 1960s. The great strength of the book is that she lets the musicians speak for themselves.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

" I hope people will learn something from what I've said," was his reply concerning the significance of interviews and whether music was best left to speak for itself. " One thing they can see is that jazz musicians in general are not just dummies, unaware and unconcerned of things other than just playing jazz. The average guy comes in the club and figures the cat just goes onto the stand high and blows till he drops, goes home, wakes up at five o'clock and staggers to the nearest bar. Hell, I don't know anybody like that. But for most musicians the music remains so much more important than any other external interests. I guess we'd be out of it if we thought otherwise."
- Art Farmer (Wilmer 1970:13)

Valerie Wilmer, noted British writer and photographer since publishing her first article in 1959 (at age 17), has written and compiled into this book fourteen profiles of prominent jazz musicians of the bebop and avant-garde jazz eras. Her profiles blend the voices and thinking of her interviewees with her context-setting attention to elements of jazz history and sociology that emerge from each individual's own comments. Each profile is a piece in its own right, and together they form an in depth profile of jazz and the jazz world of those eras.

After some 30-50-year period waiting in my 'when I retire' pile, I am equally chagrined that it took me so long and ecstatic that this was on my shelf for the moment that I finally turned to it! I've loved the book and will look to follow up with her 1977 book on players of the free jazz movement, As Serious As Your Life!

[Rodrovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interviews feature an interesting mix of jazz musicians with diverse perspectives on what jazz means to them and the people around them at that time. I was surprised (and equally intrigued) by some of the artists' opinions resisting the avant-garde/free jazz movement. Archie's interview was a neat way to end the series (before the Miles Davis three-liner lol); his opinion on jazz's racial identity exhibits a level of progressivism that I'm sure would've been out of place in the 70s (and arguably still would today), yet his rhetoric seems nuanced and well-thought-out. My favorites were some of the early ones, like Art Farmer's sentimental reverie on how music channels through him and Monk's terse piece, where Valerie seemed to do more narration than Monk. There were some that kind of fleeted by and some that didn't particularly grab me. It's a more than decent mini-historical piece for personalities in jazz from bop to post-bop eras.

7/10

[- - · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief snapshots of a handful of jazz musicians. Written in a period when many of the subjects are mostly looking back at their greatest achievements, with a sociological race-theory tint to many of the encounters.

[RA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Val Wilmer's interviews with a diverse set of "Jazz" musicians in the late 60s.

The wide variety of opinions about music, musicians, "jazz," race, drugs, business people, fans of music, etc. illustrates the musical/cultural conglomerate which exists under the "jazz" label.

A must read.