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By Root 1620 0

activity. That is why New York, notoriously so much less typical of middle America than, say, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was probably the best place to convince someone like myself that it was actually possible to understand, perhaps even to love, that extraordinary country. Le tout Manhattan despised the witch-hunt and, being a city of immigrant Jews and the centre of intellectual publishing, theatre and the popular music and recording business, took for granted the existence among some of its denizens of revolutionary Marxism, past or present. In the Big Apple only the FBI really worried about the precise nature of someone’s political commitment, for by the time I got there it was a city in which even the billionaires were, as likely as not, to be Democrats. Curiously enough jazz did not much appeal to the full-time American Marxists, whose instinctive taste seemed to be for classical music and political folksong. (I still recall the disastrous evening when I took Paul Baran to hear Miles Davis at the Black Hawk in San Francisco.)

Most of my jazz contacts were men, with a few exceptions such as the tough showbiz pro who devoted her life to furthering the career of the wonderful pianist Erroll Garner, and who tried to do me a massive favour by getting me on the Johnny Carson Show with Garner on the assumption that I would publicize the book I had recently published on jazz. (My remoteness from the realities of American publishing in 1960, thirty years ahead of the British scene, was such that I went through the entire four minutes of my interview slot without so much as mentioning the title of my book.) Most of them were in some ways refugees from the conventional American male life of the 1950s, decade of ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’, except the greatest talent-scout and promoter in the history of jazz, John Hammond Jr. No out-of-town visitor, seeing him outside, say, the Village Vanguard, would ever have asked him, as I was asked, standing with a friend outside a place in North Beach, San Francisco: ‘Excuse me, but are you two gentlemen beatniks?’ Of course, nobody needed to ask who he was outside the place to which he took me first, Small’s Paradise in Harlem. John Hammond Jr was almost a caricature of the Ivy League White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class: tall, crewcut, talking in the sort of accent in which one imagines they talked in Edith Wharton novels – he was a Vanderbilt himself – and sporting an unwavering grin. As so often in the USA, this did not indicate a great sense of humour. He was not a man for informality or casual laughs, any more than his one-time brother-in-law Benny Goodman, who had the reputation of freezing his sidemen with a basilisk stare. John remained an unreconstructed and militant 1930s leftwinger to the end, even though the FBI could never tie him down as a card-carrying communist. The history of jazz in the USA before the Second World War and, since he was probably the most important single influence in launching the ‘swing music’ vogue of the 1930s, the history of the USA, cannot be understood without him. I asked him on his death-bed, what he was proudest of in his life. He said it was to have discovered Billie Holiday.

By the time I knew him, he was no longer at the musical centre, though no man who was about to launch Bob Dylan into the big time could be regarded entirely as yesterday’s man. Another former New York jazz-lover who became my best American friend, not merely made it his business as a journalist to keep in touch with all generations within reach, old and young, but did so with a natural, good-tempered, surreal spontaneity that captured them all. This was the man who, among other things, had just discovered Lenny Bruce, and made himself election agent for the great bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the American presidency, which neither of them regarded entirely as a joke, namely Ralph Gleason. New York Irish, he had left the city to become showbusiness and popular music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that prided itself on not belonging