Hank O’Neal is most famous in the jazz world for founding and running the consistently superb swing-based Chiaroscuro label and for organizing the Floating Jazz Festival which took place for years on cruise ships. However, as his utterly fascinating book More Than Music shows, there was much more to him than that.
O’Neal, who is now 86, worked for the CIA during 1963-76 (behind the scenes rather than as a spy), built and ran two recording studios, produced over 200 albums, produced or co-produced over 150 festivals and concerts, published 25 books on a variety of subjects, and is still a very skilled and prolific photographer who along the way also worked on six documentary films,
While subtitled “A Jazz Memoir,” More Than Music is really about the most interesting characters (mostly musicians) who O’Neal knew rather than simply relating his life story. Instead of being biographical sketches, each chapter is about his association with a subject during a particular time period. The stories are fresh (many have never been told before), lively, and really give readers a good idea of each artist’s personality and humanity.
Rather than following a strict chronology, the chapters are in alphabetical order, covering the legendary if somewhat forgotten Squirrel Ashcraft, Paul Bacon, Tony Bennett, Eubie Blake, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Eddie Condon, Clint Eastwood, industrialist and jazz lover Sherman M. Fairchild, Astrud Gilberto, Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, John Hammond and George Avakian, Hugh Hefner, Bobby Henderson, Earl Hines, Milt and Mona Hinton, Jimmy and Marian McPartland, Gerry Mulligan, Les Paul, Mel Powell, Jabbo Smith, Clark Terry, Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims, George Wein, and George Wettling plus a few shorter profiles.
One learns about Ashcraft’s double life as an employee of the CIA and a pianist and supporter of early jazz, Paul Bacon’s brilliance as designer of album and book covers, Eubie Blake’s comeback in the late 1960s, the later years of Eddie Condon, several of Clint Eastwood’s projects, O’Neal’s close relationship with Astrud Gilberto, the fact that John Hammond and George Avakian did not really care for each other, an intriguing interview with Hugh Hefner, pianist Bobby Henderson’s double life (with two wives and families), O’Neal saying that he never heard Earl Hines (who he recorded often) make a mistake, and the genius of Les Paul. He also unwittingly solved a longtime mystery. I have seen a photo of John Coltrane with Count Basie but always wondered if they actually ever played together. O’Neal talks about an all-star concert that he attended in 1959 that had its climax when Coltrane sat in with the Count Basie Orchestra on “One O’Clock Jump.”
![SDJP](https://syncopatedtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/sdjp-2027.jpg" "SDJP")
In addition to the frequently surprising and always very readable anecdotes, More Than Music contains hundreds of O’Neal’s color and black & white photographs (most never seen before) plus photos of memorabilia and records. The hardcover book is quite attractive and a real page-turner although most readers will want to linger on many of the pages.
More Than The Music is one of the most essential jazz books of the past year and is highly recommended.
More Than The Music
by Hank O’Neal
Hardcover, 400 Pages, $44.95
TCU Press (tcupress.tcu.edu)
ISBN: 9780875659305
Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings. Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.
