Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James

by Peter J. Levinson

Swing is back in style, and with it a renewed interest in the Big Band Era. And few players dominated that era more than Harry James, whose soaring trumpet solos and romantic hit tunes influenced popular music for a generation. Now, Peter J. Levinson, who knew Harry James personally, has written a revealing biography of this jazz icon, based on nearly 200 interviews with musicians and friends. Harry James led a truly colorful life, and in Trumpet Blues Levinson captures it all. Beginning with James's childhood in a traveling circus, we follow the young trumpeter's meteoric rise in the 1930s and witness his electrifying performances with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. We see how James formed his own band in 1939, an incubator for many pop music stars of the 1940s and '50s, including Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest, and Kitty Kallen. Combined with James's superb musicianship, peerless trumpet technique and talented sidemen, this stellar group dominated the war years and the immediate post-war period. And James himself, especially after his marriage to film goddess Betty Grable, became one of America's most famous personalities and lived like true Hollywood royalty. Levinson describes their twenty-two-year marriage with insight and sympathy. But he shows how James's marriage--and his triumphant late-1950s comeback in Nevada's casinos--were slowly undermined by his penchant for compulsive gambling, womanizing, and alcoholism. He gives us the inside story of James's sybaritic life style, and probes the profound psychological reasons for James's destructive behavior.The first biography ever written on Harry James, Trumpet Blues is a scintillating portrait of Swing's brightest star--his life, his loves, and the music that defined an era.

Genres: Music, Biography, Jazz

329 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 1990

About the author

Peter James Levinson was born on July 1, 1934, in Atlantic City and graduated from the University of Virginia, where he began writing about jazz artists and producing jazz concerts. He continued to produce concerts while serving in the Army in Korea. He then took a job as a music publicist with Columbia Records, after a brief stint as a freelance writer.

He eventually started his own publicity firm in New York and later expanded it to Los Angeles.

Mr. Levinson handled publicity for stars including Dave Brubeck, Rosemary Clooney, Stan Getz, Woody Herman, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Mel Tormé. He publicized the hit television series “Dallas” and the film “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), which won an Academy Award for best picture. He helped to orchestrate the campaign to issue a postage stamp honoring Duke Ellington.

In an interview in 2004 with Tom Nolan on the Web site januarymagazine.com, Mr. Levinson said he had never planned to become an author. “I can’t say that I set a path for myself to do this,” he said. “It just occurred to me.”

“If you work as a publicist,” he added, “you’re working not only with artists but with managers and agents and so forth. You get an understanding of what careers are all about.”

Mr. Levinson’s first book was “Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James” (1999), a biography of the trumpeter and bandleader. Mr. Levinson mined his reminiscences from 24 years of knowing James, as well as from 200 interviews with musicians and James’s friends, to paint a portrait that pulled few punches.

“Long before there was sex, drugs and rock and roll, there was sex, alcohol and big-band swing,” People magazine said about the book. “And as this surprisingly absorbing biography suggests, trumpet player Harry James could have been the role model for Mick Jagger.”

Mr. Levinson next wrote “September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle” (2001), about the arranger known for his work with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. Variety praised Mr. Levinson’s detailed description of the artistic and personal relationship between Sinatra and Riddle, again drawing from his experiences with both. But the review also complained that mountains of “mundane detail” got in the way of the Sinatra story.

His next book was “Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way” (2005), which told how Sinatra patterned himself after Dorsey, the trombonist and bandleader, in everything from his way of breathing while singing to his wardrobe to his dashing self-assuredness. A fourth book, “Puttin’ on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache — a Biography,” was published in March, 2009.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough look at Harry James' life and career, but the narrative is too often a stream of minutiae about bookings, recording dates, and band personnel. This seems to be a common hazard of jazz biographies. While cataloging a musician's body of work in such detail might interest jazz fanatics, it makes for poor reading. Some of the anecdotes from the road, however, are fascinating and offer great insight into the evolution of the music business in the first half of the twentieth century.

[M. Apple · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Live a life worthy writing about, or write about a life worth living.”

Harry James certainly lived a life worth writing about, and what a wonderful, awful, celebrated, and miserable life it was.

It’s hard to feel sympathy for a person who abused his loved ones so much, but it’s easy to understand why he did it, without condoning his behavior.

He was one of the most fantastic trumpet players of all time, and in an era when segregation and Jim Crow ruled, he even refused to discriminate based on anything but talent.

I initially got this book because of his songs about baseball (James was a Dodgers fan, and later a Cardinals fan, and was completely obsessed with baseball — he even made his band members play baseball against other bands and was good enough to have gone pro when he was younger).

There are several places in the book that needed a stronger editorial hand — paragraphs that have little to do with the rest of the chapter and time jumps all over. But that’s typical in a biography, particularly by someone who knew the person being written about.

The sheer number of names of jazz musicians is a little hard to keep track of, but the escapades, the events, the attitude of the man are worth reading.

If only to remind us what NOT to do in life.

[Nelson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Levinson is an amiable admirer (mostly) of James the player and an even-handed, perhaps overly apologetic scribe for James the man. What he is not, unfortunately, is a biographer. He was a publicist and the biography reads like a laundry list of dates and players. It is more a chronicle than an evaluation—which is probably good, since Levinson is better on dates and recounting showbiz stories than he is on placing James in the jazz canon. The thing should be much shorter. James' womanizing, drinking and gambling are documented in numbing, excruciating detail. Every change in personnel (and management) seems recorded as well—little of which seems relevant to saying something substantive about James as a player. Some of this might be relevant to James' talent (and shortcomings) as a bandleader, but it is such a slog to get through. There are a load of anecdotes and fascinating comments here, buried under the morass of managerial minutiae and financial idiocies perpetrated by James over the years. Despite its many inadequacies, it whetted my appetite to track down more of James' recorded output.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harry James was een trompettist met een krachtig helder geluid, en een bandleider die steeds op zoek was naar het juiste repertoire om 'on the road' te blijven. We lezen over zijn strak geregisseerde jeugd als circuskind en over zijn onvermogen om ooit echt volwassen te worden. Een onmogelijke man die mateloos dronk en gokte en die vond dat vrouwen bestonden voor zijn genoegens. Mooi tijdsbeeld van de opkomst en ondergang van de big bands in het swing era. De persoonlijke band met zijn biograaf (die bij een boekingskantoor werkte) klinkt door in de wat vergoeilijkende toon waarop James' misdragingen worden beschreven. Ook wordt een scherpe beschrijving van de positie van zwarte muzikanten en bands in de witte entertainment-wereld vermeden. Of omgekeerd de positie die deze Texaanse trompettist kon innemen vanwege zijn huidskleur en knalblauwe ogen.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are parts that were interesting though as with a few biographies I have read, the focus is very nearly on the names and dates of music and songs. It is ok to list these, of course, but perhaps in an alphabetical form at the back or by date, in a separate place. All the detailed foo-fah-rah just diminishes the actual story, which while compelling in itself, manages to confuse and bog down the average reader. A good example of an excellent biography is that of a recently read Cliff Richard by Steve Turner. There are human interest stories, background material, a real "feel" for the time period(s) and up close and personal encounters with other famous and infamous performers along the way. Even WITH the intersplicing of the dates and song titles, the biography is readable and interesting.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably just the Kindle version, but it was very distracting: W for fi; V for ff; X for fl----throughout the book. It was very distracting every few sentences to have to stop and figure out what the word was supposed to be.
I guess it beats no book at all, but it was more a laundry list of dates of band engagements and changes in band personnel. Not much about Harry's life outside of the band, though the books makes a good argument that he really didn't have a life outside of the band.

[Steve Wolcott · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly indepth book about not just Harry James but the whole Big Band scene from the 1930s through the 1970s.

[Harold · Rating 4 out of 5]

If a bio of a musician is realistic and not puff pastry, I like it. I don't know a lot about Harry James other than I remember seeing him on tv a lot when I was a kid - and I was a jazz fan even as a kid. He always sounded great - always had a band in a Basie kinda groove and always played really impressive trumpet. Chops city if you know what I mean.

[Goldie Marie · Rating 1 out of 5]

It sucks so far

[Tina Grove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read when I was in high school and was enamored with Harry James the trumpet virtuoso.