2025 JJA Book Award Winners

In this episode of The Buzz, JJA board member Bob Blumenthal speaks with two 2025 book award winners: Jonathan Grasse and Elijah Wald.

Jonathan Grasse teaches music at California State University, Dominguez Hills, focusing on world music, theory, and composition. He wrote the definitive English-language study of Brazilian regional music in Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories, and Minas Gerais and examined Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges's 1972 album in The Corner Club. His latest work, Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy (Jawbone Press), won JJA's 2025 Biography of the Year.

Elijah Wald is a musician and author of over a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens (about insult games in rap development), and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music. He also wrote Dylan Goes Electric, which inspired the film A Complete Unknown. With a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics plus a Grammy for production and liner notes, Wald's Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories earned JJA's 2025 Book of the Year for history, criticism, and culture.

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Transcript

Lawrence Peryer: Hello and welcome to the Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters focused on jazz. I'm Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of the Buzz. I am pleased today to bring you JJA board member Bob Blumenthal, hosting a discussion with two of our 2025 book award winners, Jonathan Grasse and Elijah Wald.

Jonathan Grasse is a professor of music at California State University, Dominguez Hills. There, he teaches world music, music theory, and composition. His work "Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories, and Minas Gerais" is the definitive English-language study on that region's musical traditions. It's complemented by another of his books, "The Corner Club," in which Jonathan examines Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges's 1972 album "Clube da Esquina." Jonathan's book "Jazz Revolutionary: The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy," published by Jawbone Press, is JJA's 2025 Biography of the Year.

Elijah Wald is a musician and author of over a dozen books, including "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues," "The Dozens," which examines the role of that insult game in the development of rap, and "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music." He also wrote the Dylan Goes Electric, which served as the inspiration for the film A Complete Unknown. Elijah has a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics and a Grammy for production and liner notes. His book "Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories" is JJA's 2025 Book of the Year about history, criticism, and culture. And now I bring you Bob Blumenthal, Jonathan Grasse, and Elijah Wald.

Bob Blumenthal: Welcome to the podcast and great to see you both. Let me start with this. I'm always curious about why an author chooses their subjects. So let me ask, why you chose to write about Eric Dolphy.

Jonathan Grasse: I was struck by his playing even as a non-jazz musician in my high school years—just completely taken by his style, along with Ornette and Coltrane and others from that era. And through the years I wondered why there wasn't a more significant book about Dolphy in different respects. But it was never something that I put on the front burner in my academic career. For one, I'm not necessarily a jazz scholar except for a few of these topics that I've pursued. So I think the fact that there hadn't been a significant Dolphy biography motivated me to write one.

But I had already done a lot of hobbyist background work. It was just something I did on the side of maintaining what I called the "Dolphy Diary" because I sensed that there were conflicting dates and different takes on different parts of his life that seemed conflicting to me. So I wanted to take notes and have a file on his life that evolved into a book project only a few years ago.

Bob Blumenthal: And when did you start compiling the data in your personal file?

Jonathan Grasse: That would've been in the late eighties, early nineties. I just wanted to know more about—of course, the Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman book is great. I love that book. The discography is fantastic. But the biographical stuff only amounts to whatever, eighty, ninety pages. And I just wanted to fill in the blanks, so I started to take notes.

And then maybe a decade later, in the late nineties, I met Gerald Wilson and started to type some of this stuff up. Not because of meeting Gerald Wilson, but it seemed to trigger—moving down to LA and meeting him and being around here triggered a more systematic approach to my Dolphy Diary project, which was always on the way, way back burner.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay.

Jonathan Grasse: And it just—

Bob Blumenthal: Now, Eli, it could be said you've written around your subject before. I don't know what brought you to it, given the various topics you've pursued.

Elijah Wald: This one in particular—I was living in Los Angeles in 2003, I think it was, when the complete Jelly Roll Morton Library of Congress recordings were finally released for the first time. And I was there working on Mexican Chicano gangster rap. And also right around that time, I think I was actually teaching my blues class with a lot of students who were listening to that. And I was struck by the fact that a bunch of the material in that Jelly Roll Morton series—he's using the language and subject matter that was common in gangster rap, but had not been allowed to be recorded until really the seventies and didn't become common and widely dispersed till the nineties.

And in Jelly Roll Morton's case, this stuff had been recorded in 1939, and those tracks had never been issued until the 1990s. And it included a song that's fifty-two—it's a narrative ballad in twelve-bar blues form. What's there in the recording is fifty-two verses long, a half an hour long. There is no other evidence that there ever were such things as epic ballads in twelve-bar blues form. And the only one ever recorded was recorded in 1939. And nobody asked anybody else of that generation about that because it was hidden away because the language was considered obscene.

And that got me wondering how much else we don't know about the blues and jazz tradition because it came out of worlds where people talked—black people talked in bars—and therefore was literally unprintable. You could not send it through the mails. So I started looking around just to see how much had survived and what people were saying in interviews, and just trying to get a sense of how much of that world had been concealed through censorship and what scraps might have survived. And basically spent a dozen years on that.

Partway through that project, I did my book on the dozens, which was directly—which was very much the same project. And then I decided to do the broader project and went back to the Jelly Roll Morton, basically using him as the Virgil to my Dante, the guy who I was following through this world that he knew well.

Bob Blumenthal: But it's also a story of not only Morton, but his interlocutor, as it were, because this gets told through the eyes of a third party.

Elijah Wald: You're right. In that sense, it's very much in line with my other books. A lot of what I do is try to remind people that history is not what happened in the past. It's the process of creating stories and narratives about what happened in the past. And they always are created in the present by particular people with particular interests for particular purposes. And if you go back over the same material asking different questions, you'll see completely different things.

Perfect example in this book: there's a guy I talk about named George the Rhymer, who when I started looking at old interviews of the old jazz guys from New Orleans is mentioned over and over by Kid Ory, by all sorts of people as the most popular performer around the district. And all these jazz historians had done these interviews, and not one of them ever mentioned him in their books because his skill was that he improvised rhymes on people's names or whatever else. And that was the big moneymaking skill. And he was not an interesting musician.

So all these people did interviews with Kid Ory and Pops Foster and other people who described him as the most popular bandleader in the district. And none of them mentioned him 'cause he wasn't relevant in the 1930s or the forties or the fifties or the sixties. But now that we're living in the world of rap, suddenly that's really interesting history.

Bob Blumenthal: I want to take you back to the first music you heard that led you to write this book. If there's some specific music that if you could go back and say, "Here's the seed that was planted when I heard this song or this track." What do you think?

Jonathan Grasse: In my case, it would definitely be the Prestige re-release of "Outward Bound" that I picked up in my library—my local library—after reading Eric Dolphy's name for the first time in the title of a Frank Zappa tune, "Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue." And I love that track and that whole "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" album. And I put that record on, and "GW" is the opening track, and it fused part of the universe right into my brain. The rest of those tracks from "Outward Bound," I just found equally charming and powerful. Definitely Dolphy's first studio album as a leader on Prestige was the initial kick.

Bob Blumenthal: Okay. Elijah?

Elijah Wald: I suppose it would be the first time I heard the uncensored version of "Winin' Boy," which was a song I knew perfectly well. A label called Stash Records—it was mostly releasing LPs of early jazz and blues drug songs—put out an album called "Copulate and Blues." And all the other tracks on it were the usual double entendre stuff. And then there's Jelly Roll Morton, and he is saying "fuck." And it blew my mind. And then when I heard the Library of Congress stuff, it's "Oh, so there's a whole bunch of this stuff."

And that then opened up the fact that there was a whole world. I also played for years with Howard Armstrong, who used to do a filthy version of "Darktown Strutters' Ball," which, as it turned out, everybody in the old days did a filthy version of "Darktown Strutters' Ball."

Bob Blumenthal: The basic difference in the two books—the Dolphy book, it's a first-time serious biography. Whereas your subject, Elijah, there's been a lot written and a lot challenged about previous writing. And let me start with Elijah, who has to deal with the sludge of previous efforts to work through.

Elijah Wald: First of all, that's what I do. An awful lot of my books have been "Let's look at stories we've heard a bunch of times and go back to the primary sources and see if it looks different to us." And it almost always does. If you look at stuff just 'cause you are different than the people then, and particularly if you're looking in a different time, things look very different.

In the case of Jelly Roll Morton, one of the main things that I had to dig through was that the rap on him forever has been you can't trust a word the man says. And that's just not true. His dates are sometimes off by a few years, but by and large, he's a remarkably reliable chronicler of his times. And the thing that got him into trouble was this letter to "Down Beat" where he claimed to have personally invented jazz in 1902. His main point in that letter—he was countering a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" show that he was writing countering, and people have been writing about this forever. And as far as I know, no one before me ever bothered to try to get the script of the Ripley show, which has been there all the time. And in which W.C. Handy claimed to have written the first blues and had the first jazz band known all over the country as the greatest jazz band in America, which is just flat-out ridiculous. And that's what Morton was responding to.

And what he was mostly saying was not him personally—it was, sorry, New Orleans. There were all these guys playing jazz in New Orleans when W.C. Handy had never heard the damn stuff, which by our current definition of jazz is incontrovertible. But also, and he listed a bunch of names, right? He said, "In fact, I'm doing this historical project with the Library of Congress, and in terms of blues, I'm gonna go back and talk with all these older guys in New Orleans." And he lists these names who, if you go back, are exactly the names you'd want to, in fact, talk to.

Bob Blumenthal: One issue that I think you deal with remarkably well, right at the introduction of the book, is "It's 2025, but you're gonna see a lot of stuff that you might find very objectionable. So I'm just letting you know how I'm gonna approach this subject." Did an editor say, "Hey, why don't you just get that out of the way"?

Elijah Wald: No. That was completely my own idea. Honestly, a lot of what I'm reacting to is that we're living in a time when I'm surrounded by people saying, "Oh, if you're a white guy, you can't talk about race. If you are a man, you can't talk about women," and all this, and it's complete bullshit. Nobody objects to you talking about stuff if you talk about it respectfully and foreground the fact that you are speaking about it, in my case, as a white male.

So I knew from the beginning—I learned this in the Robert Johnson book. If I say I'm writing about this as a white guy, the only people who are offended are other white guys who feel like their opinions should be listened to without that screen being attached. No objection from black people about me talking about black music, saying, "White people have this really weird perception of this stuff, and I'm one of them. Our perception has driven a lot of the history, and that's real. Offensive or not. And black people have often heard these things very differently from white people, and I'm gonna try to understand that, but I'm who I am."

So you know that I've been there from the beginning, this book obviously, because all of the obscenity and because people use the n-word regularly. And notice I make the choice right here in this interview: I say "fuck," I say "bullshit." I don't say the n-word. And I wanted in the introduction to foreground the fact that this sort of thing is always choices.

Bob Blumenthal: Now Jonathan, you could talk about some of these issues as well, but I'm also curious about—it's the first time, and you've gotta find the facts. And I know you mentioned already that moving to Los Angeles inspired you to get more serious about what became the book, but can you talk a little about that and using Los Angeles as a resource specifically?

Jonathan Grasse: I wouldn't go that far as a literal resource because—I think because of Dolphy's legacy, being the only child, dying so young as he did without his own family—there isn't that lineage of people to contact with diaries or family memoirs. That was non-existent. Rather, it was more of an inspirational thing, just the power of place, if you will, and becoming a little bit more involved with some of the jazz scene here and some other academics who are interested in twentieth-century LA jazz history in an informal way. So it's not so much literal sources. That was a problem with the book in general—sources.

I had to get the timeline. I was preoccupied with just telling a skeletal, bare-bones factual outline with any dates of sessions and gigs and correspondence, what have you, that placed him here or there. That's a solid background. So Los Angeles itself wasn't so much a source. He left in fifty-eight. I've driven by the house he grew up in. I've visited his grave. Those are more inspirational journeys that help propel the project.

Bob Blumenthal: In reading the book, I wondered if you had access to the high school information through the schools, if that was one way Dolphy could be researched, or the black press in LA—some specific resources.

Jonathan Grasse: We're blessed with Google, I hate to say it that way. The "Sentinel" and a couple other black newspapers—a lot of their archives are available through different websites. And I just tirelessly searched through those for dozens of specific references that were priceless because they did tell the story the best they could about what Dolphy's activities were before leaving LA with the Chico Hamilton Quintet in the late fifties. So we're talking about sporadic press coverage. On one hand, he's the outlier jazz revolutionary. On the other hand, he's just a gigging musician who was very active in all kinds of commercial veins as well. That was an eyeopener for me as well.

But I have to admit it's not so much the physical locations of Los Angeles with archives or what have you that enabled that. I did work with a fellow at a Los Angeles college that helped with getting between the lines of his enrollment there on two different occasions, ten years apart. That was confusing at first 'cause I didn't realize that he had gone back there. There were some anomalies that didn't make sense. But Los Angeles—more of an inspirational guide than a literal source.

Bob Blumenthal: Let me pick one issue that fascinated me 'cause I had heard about his studio that his parents converted for him. And these musicians who had passed through there, including Clifford Brown when he effectively auditioned for Max Roach. These stories have cropped up, and just how you built the story of this studio?

Jonathan Grasse: Yeah, I had to be careful with that 'cause I really wanted a strong sense of valid confirmation about what went on there. Generally, from a very young age, his parents backed this interest in music, which is wonderful, right? And he benefited from this little converted garage-shed type of deal that even later was further modified when he got out of the army and returned in his twenties.

But the lineage is pretty incredible. Of course, he met Coltrane roughly the same time. The Harold Land audition for the Max Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet occurred in this shed. And there are touching moments in a film where Roy Porter is visiting and being interviewed in that shed—obviously years later, twenty, thirty years later. Also, Buddy Collette is captured on film visiting that shed, of course many years later, forty years later, commenting on his memories of having mentored Dolphy and probably visiting him there at the shed.

In addition to that, there are a couple of anecdotes from various sources of like neighborhood kids who recall Dolphy playing Charlie Parker records in his studio in the backyard. One neighbor sharing anecdotes of conversations with him concerning the beauty of natural sounds of bird calls and the wind through the trees that just really bring home the grounding of that experience. Being able to describe that was important.

And also Alan Saul, who has a wonderful website on Dolphy's life among other topics, did his own share of incredible work over the years and actually discovered some documents at the home years after Dolphy passed away, after Eric's parents passed away. That helped with a timeline of what went on with that studio—bills and receipts for little construction work that went on there to build up the studio for Eric's use.

Bob Blumenthal: Your book is titled "The Life and Music of Eric Dolphy." But Elijah, your book is about lives and about specific music distinct from those lives as well. In reading the book, because I've been listening to Jelly Roll Morton for decades, I thought, "Oh, he's just this guy who's just pulling stuff from everywhere." On the other hand, you can look at Morton as the guy who coalesced it into a musical foundation. Was that balance an issue for you?

Elijah Wald: No. And I have to say there are a couple of things there. One of them is that one of my big missions is trying to get twentieth-century music historians away from records because recordings represent a tiny unrepresentative sample of what people played. Yet so much of the history has been written as if what people played is what's on record. This book was about what Morton heard and recreated from the first decade of the twentieth century, maybe up to 1915, when there are no recordings. A huge part of this project was trying to discuss music that was never recorded and, therefore, which historians have tended to ignore 'cause they can't hear it.

I'm fascinated by how much we can, in fact, find out about this stuff. And I should just say, following what Jonathan said about Google, the Internet's been unbelievable. The fact that you now have all these newspapers that you can search and census records and police records—the amount of information at our fingertips is amazing. And the flip side of that—most of the material I quote in the book is not online, has never been digitized. There's so much stuff still sitting in archives that no one has looked at.

But the other thing that I should just say is, as with my book on "Narco Corridos," I'm always interested in areas that you could write a book about that are driven by lyrics rather than music. Writing about music is really hard because you can't put it on the page. Whereas lyrics you can put on the page. So if I'm writing the history of lyrics, you can read 'em in the book.

And I should, in that context, just add—I'm not an audiobook person, but in this particular case, the audiobook is read by a black woman named Melo-Dee. And she's terrific, and she delivers all of the material absolutely brilliantly. And honestly, I think this book is better in her voice than mine.

Bob Blumenthal: Jonathan, in writing "The Life and Music," I want to ask you about the balance, but also about a decision of how to approach the life. 'Cause I think it's fair to say Eric Dolphy was a very unique individual. He lived with his parents, had basically a stronger relation with his parents than any fellow musicians throughout his entire life. He seemed not a comfortable mixer with people. There's not a lot about his romantic attachments. How did you choose to say, "I can say this much about this subject as a person, but I really want to focus on the music and the milestones of his career"?

Jonathan Grasse: First of all, you're a bit mistaken. He was famously sociable. I think most of the sources—whether they were music people or musicians or any other kind of marginal character who's commented—there's so many references to, for instance, his kindness, helping others out. And that formed the basis of his friendships, particularly with Coltrane. So he was a spiritual brother to Coltrane.

As a writer, the last thing I'm gonna do is extrapolate and romanticize about what things might have been and use that kind of language, which we all have to fall back on occasionally—some speculative air of what may have happened or "this was," "it was possible that." And that's necessary, right? But I didn't do too much of that. And you're absolutely right about filling in the blanks. I wish I knew more about him. I think all of his fans do. I hope that there's a subsequent surge of interest in his life and people come up with all kinds of new sources that I didn't find.

His love life or the fact that he was drug-free at a time when others were not drug-free to a tragic extent—that goes back to your opening comment, is that he was a unique character, right? There's something about him that's out of the norm, if you will. Putting up with Mingus on one hand—benefiting greatly from being invited into the workshop. Obviously it was a career maker. Some of his best playing is with Mingus, and everyone knows that. Yet he was a harsh dude, and there are anecdotes of Mingus confronting Dolphy as he did with a lot of his other players, perhaps to the point of humiliation in front of an audience. But I think Dolphy stood in a certain air with Mingus in that respect and weathered that. I found a few anecdotes about some real confrontations between them, but that's really marginal. But I know what you're saying. Where do you choose to fill in the blanks, and how do you just move on from not knowing what happened? So yeah, it's tough.

I do want to say that I hear Elijah really clearly about this issue of recordings, and in my project it was the complete opposite. Recordings for the Dolphy biography were more than a cornerstone. It's a lot of the material itself—the recording sessions, the recording, the vinyl that comes out and then is reissued. And really, because of his early death, that's really how people after 1964 get to know his music.

But Elijah, you're absolutely spot-on about the more vast, complex, interesting nature of what we're not able to listen to from the past and conjuring music that hasn't been recorded. I love that because that's just gold, right? But I didn't have the luxury of doing that. Rather, I needed to construct a timeline that relied very heavily on recording sessions, when records came out, reviews of recordings—because that's something in the book that I wanted to convey in a particular way without going overboard. And that is the abuse Dolphy received from "Down Beat," which in the final version of my book I backed off a little—for the better, I believe. But those diatribes, those awful things critics said about Eric Dolphy were either from the rare club review, but more often just the negative response to recordings.

So not only from this corner of the historiography—it is really not just recordings, but reviews of recordings as well.

Bob Blumenthal: But to me it's a great irony that one advantage Elijah had was he has a recording of Jelly Roll's voice, and you'll correct me if I'm mistaken, but the only recording of Eric Dolphy's voice I know is the sentence at the end of "Last Date." I believe most of the interviews you quote are print interviews. And I wonder, how much of Eric Dolphy's speaking voice do we have?

Jonathan Grasse: That's a good question. He was interviewed in Europe on two occasions at the start of the Mingus tour, the last tour in the spring of sixty-four. And again, Alan Saul's work provided some of those materials—either transcriptions or the audio itself.

Bob Blumenthal: Let me ask each of you if you can name your most surprising discovery in writing the book. Let me start with Elijah.

Elijah Wald: Oh God, there were so many. Surprising discovery. Yeah, I guess the basic one for me was just how much in fact had survived of this material that when I started I thought, "Oh my God, you know, this Jelly Roll Morton and there's one recording of a woman named Lucille Bogan singing an uncensored blues called 'Shave 'Em Dry,' and I thought that's basically all there is."

And the big surprise was finding that John Lomax, Alan Lomax, but also all sorts of other people, had in fact kept files of the stuff they couldn't print. People had preserved all this unprintable, un-recordable material. So I'd say the big surprise was I went in to tell this story of this world that had not been documented. And it's still partly that, but also I was able to document way more than I had expected at the beginning.

Bob Blumenthal: Jonathan, how about you?

Jonathan Grasse: Yeah, that's a great question. And there were quite a few. I think in the most general sense, it would be Dolphy's career in commercial music in the fifties in Los Angeles. There are rumors that were hard to believe, but they're true. There's suggestion that Dolphy played on a lot of the hits of the Platters, that maybe he was under contract to Buck Ram, who was behind the reinvention of the Platters and popular late-fifties rock and roll in Hollywood. And Dolphy was there. He appears in "Rock All Night," this cheesy, horrible flick. He is there playing baritone sax, and he played on Ernie Freeman records—kind of raunchy rock. And Gerald Wilson spoke in vague terms about hiring Dolphy on and off for many years after he returned from his stint in the Army. Gerald Wilson was very successful with Capitol Records as an arranger.

So from fifty-four to fifty-eight, there was Eric Dolphy living with his parents, getting these pretty good gigs. That was ultimately a pie-in-the-sky dream he had of being a studio musician playing multiple instruments, right? This great array of instruments. It is just that segregation and those horrible contexts of those times really batted those dreams down quickly. He knew that, but yet here he was, plying the waters of rock and R&B and film music and commercial gigs before breaking away with Chico Hamilton.

Also, I would say the other surprising thing would be certainly his death—specifics about his death, different perspectives that I caught through the film "Last Date" and also interviewing Carl Berger and his wife, who were there that night. They had hired him for that gig. And then Carl died not so long after our interview. That was shocking. Just the specifics about hearing these eyewitness accounts—conflicting eyewitness accounts—and not wanting to ignore this or that version. I chose to portray his collapse at the Tangent Club from these varying, conflicting perspectives. Like Elijah mentioned, there are a lot of astonishing things that came out for sure.

Bob Blumenthal: I want to end with two—I think there'll be quick questions for each of you. The first: if you had to create a listener's guide for people to get them prepared to read your book, maybe four to six items. What might you come up with, Elijah? Let me start with you.

Elijah Wald: The obvious one is the complete Jelly Roll Morton Library of Congress recordings. On top of that, the Lucille Bogan "Shave 'Em Dry," which I mentioned. I should say, the big hole in all of this is so much more material exists from men than from women. And that's an old story in folklore. Yeah, those are the big ones. The amount of wonderful filthy material—a lot of it's boring, but the amount of wonderful filthy material out there.

There's a Clovers recording of the "Darktown Strutters' Ball" satire, "The Rotten Cocksuckers' Ball," that you can get through the Smithsonian. That's an amazing object. I don't have it in the book, but it's the Clovers. There's also the Martin, Bogan and Armstrong—Howard Armstrong's group, since I played with him—his version also of "Darktown Strutters' Ball." But in terms of things to listen to, like I said, it's mostly stuff that isn't on record. So let's go with that list.

Bob Blumenthal: And the Morton recordings were what, thirteen CDs, I believe?

Elijah Wald: It's just eight CDs with all the interviews. You can pick out the dirty stuff. Interestingly, that's become a problem because in the libraries they used to mark all the dirty stuff with a triangle. It was called Delta material. But when they digitized the card catalogs, nobody knew that. So what you used to be able to search for, digitizing has made invisible.

Bob Blumenthal: Let me go to Jonathan now.

Jonathan Grasse: I would say the two recordings of Dolphy's as leader would be "Outward Bound" and "Out to Lunch." That's the beginning and ending of his career as a studio project leader. His work with Booker Little, the Eric Dolphy–Booker Little Quintet live at the Five Spot, has some fantastic material. And with Coltrane, I would forego the studio work he did and just go with live stuff. Really. The Impulse Complete Village Vanguard collection that came out at the end of the nineties has just wonderful material. That gig previously was represented from Dolphy's perspective on two pretty mediocre releases in sixty-two and sixty-three. So the Impulse Complete Village Vanguard, "Out to Lunch," "Outward Bound"—and of course the live Coltrane tour of Europe in November sixty-one. And then his last tour with Mingus in Europe sixty-four—there are wonderful recordings there as well.

Bob Blumenthal: What book should be written, not necessarily by you, but a book you would be dying to read? Elijah?

Elijah Wald: That's a tough one. There are a lot of biographies I'd like to see people do. Honestly, I'm doing one of the projects right now that got to bothering me because I was listening over and over to all these interviews coming out of New Orleans, and they were all done by jazz nuts. And just as people start telling interesting stories about that world, Bill Russell will interrupt and say, "Yeah, but who was the bass player on that session?" And it, after a while, just drives you nuts. People are actually trying to tell stories.

So I'm doing a biography right now of a woman who Morton mentions briefly in passing. Her name was Ready Money, and she was a thief and to some extent a sex worker—certainly worked in that business. And I have traced her back to Evansville, Indiana, in the 1880s and forward through twelve years in New Orleans where Morton knew her first, and then to San Diego, where she ended up owning the largest black-owned hotel in southern California with a staff of sixty people and a full big band in her nightclub, the Creole Palace.

I think way too many books on music pay way too much attention to the music. And one of my basic beliefs is musical scenes are made by audiences, not by musicians, because musicians have to play what the audiences want to hear. And I'd like to see way more books on the worlds in which musicians played rather than other musicians.

Bob Blumenthal: Jonathan?

Jonathan Grasse: What I was gonna say is a generalist's view of outlier music genres of the twentieth century without so much regard to the purity of genre—the boundary crossing, the maybe more marginal experimental musics that occur in so many different ways without focusing on the cool insider language so many writers on music use to portray those worlds. So really trying to capture the freedom of creativity in music.

My current book project is really about the wider context for psychedelic rock and a social history of LSD. And it's not to advocate for drug use at all. It's more in response to the alarming amount of scholarship that's coming out about mid-century developments in the government's use of drugs and the Cold War. But also just to revisit these incredible compilations that people have been putting together for twenty, thirty years of sixties psychedelic music, and kind of redefine connections to broader musical roots in concert music and jazz. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Thank you so much, Bob Blumenthal, Jonathan Grasse, and Elijah Wald. Don't miss new episodes of the Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information about the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJAnews.org. I'm Lawrence Peryer. Thanks for listening and stay in touch.