Hot Jazz Special

Welcome to Body and Soul, a cool café where good food, great coffee and even greater music are the order of the night. This is where, for one performance only and before your very ears, Duke Ellington assembles his Hot Eight for a definitive performance of his classic ‘Jump for Joy’. So will you please put your han’s together for – at the piano, Jelly Roll Morton, on the bass – Walter Page; Django Reinhardt on guitar. Trumpet chair goes to Louis Armstrong who’s joined in the front line by Benny Goodman’s clarinet and the flying alto of Charlie Parker. Out front is singer Billie Holiday and à la batterie the great Gene Krupa. The Duke does the arrangement, calls the tune and wags the stick (and he’ll spell Jelly Roll at the keyboard before the night’s out).

For this remarkable assemblage of words and pictures – all by Jonny Hannah – is an exuberant celebration of the Joy of Jazz. Now, I’ve been a slave to the rhythm for longer than I’ve been anything else – it’s as near as I get to religion – so I’ve kept an eye out for anything that comes close to explaining the Joy of Jazz – especially to younger folk, and trust me, fans, there’s been nothing. Poets like Langston Hughes and Annesley Vachell have almost got it, but no writer (and, yes, I’ve had a go myself) has hit the button like this Jonny Hannah.

The whole thing (apart from the valuable bio-discographies at the end) is in verse – jumping, rumbling and fumbling – and Hannah’s go-for-it hand-lettering complements his rhymestyle perfectly. Then there’s his pictures – affectionate naif portraits bursting with lively good humour get us nearer to the bodies and souls of the musicians than the reams of turgid ‘explanatory’ prose that’ve been written about them. Yes, this is a book that tells us – any of us, not just jazz fans – what jazz feels like and to my knowledge there’s never been another.

But it’s more than that – it’s a riotously joyful (that word again, it won’t stay out!) art experience, it’s a great expression of after-dark downtown city life American style and it’s a superb collection of verses. Dull would be the parent, teacher or other guardian who could pull nothing from it. And the poster-dustjacket (though ‘what dust?’ I ask myself) is worth the price alone. This is, apparently, Hannah’s ‘first children’s book’ – so let’s hope he lives as long and as productively as Eubie Blake*.

*Eubie Blake was a ragtime and jazz pianist, composer and showman who lived to be over 100. On his 90th birthday he said ‘If I’d known I was goin’ to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.’