On Jazz: A Personal Journey

★★★★ Alyn Shipton CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. £20

Zesty anecdotes of a mellifluous jazz sage.

If you only know Alyn Shipton as the avuncular voice of Radio 3’s Jazz Record Requests, benignly cueing up the amazing cover of Rush’s Tom Sawyer by Brad Mehldau, you’re in for a splendid shock. Not least in the form of the full story behind ‘Blue’ Lu Barker’s saucy 1938 classic Don’t You Feel My Leg. Deftly weaving together personal reminiscence of Shipton’s own bass-playing exploits with telling vignettes from the thousands of interviews he’s conducted as a broadcaster, biographer and prolific co-writer of jazz memoirs, On Jazz covers a spectacularly extensive waterfront. From the curmudgeonly wind-up strategies of Ken Colyer, through the exact microphone set-up for Duke Ellington’s Newport Suite, to an illuminating encounter with

Ornette Coleman, this book is not a smorgasbord, it’s a feast.