Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs Of The 1940s And 1950s

★★★★ Jeff Gold HARPER DESIGN. £30

Unseen photos and new interviews from a time when jazz was the hippest thing.

You could spend hours just staring at the performance photos here and dreaming of time travel: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes jamming it up in New York in 1953; Dizzy Gillespie leading his big band at the Savoy. But mostly what you get here is regular folks clustered tightly at tables – in Chicago, Atlantic City, San Francisco and several other American jazz capitals – drink glasses in hand, wide grins on their faces, out for a memorable night digging the music of the moment. Historian Jeff Gold has gathered dozens of such photos, alongside gig advertisements, handbills, tour programmes and the like, and tied the tantalising visuals to new interviews (Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones) and fascinating capsule bios of the places where it all happened. Who knew, for example, that the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, before they launched Atlantic Records, hosted racially integrated jazz parties at Washington DC’s Turkish Embassy? The musicians, fans and club owners probably weren’t aware of it, but they were making history night after night.