Herb Gardner is an important trombonist and pianist who probably felt like he was a little too late as the youngest man in the room when he got to New York in 1963. It turns out he was right on time to play with a huge number of first and second generation legends of the jazz world and launch a career stretching over 60 years.
He tells his story in one of the best put together jazz autobiographies I’ve had the pleasure to review. I’m not being facetious. I’ve read great ones by relatively minor artists who also happen to have a story telling gift, and many others who did not. To be frank, the jazz life of recent decades is not the most exciting thing, and one musician’s chronicle of funny things that happened on the bandstand can easily blur into anothers. If a biography is supposed to endow an image of the man, and imprint the reader with some memory of his major life events, then Herb Gardner’s At the Jazz Band Ball gets the job done in record time. The reader will appreciate it.
