Trumpet Blues

Swing is back in style, and with it a renewed interest in the big band era. Few players dominated that era more than Harry James, whose trumpet solos and romantic hit tunes influenced popular music for a generation. This work reveals this jazz icon, based on interviews with musicians and friends.

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Swing is back in style, and with it a renewed interest in the big band era. And few players dominated that era more than Harry James, whose soaring trumpet solos and romantic hit tunes influenced popular music for a generation. Now, Peter J. Levinson, who knew Harry James personally, has written a revealing biography of this jazz icon, based on nearly 200 interviews with musicians and friends. Harry James led a truly colourful life, and in this book Levinson captures it all. Beginning with James's childhood in a travelling circus, the reader can follow the young trumpeter's meteoric rise in the 1930s and witness his electrifying performances with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and see how James formed his own band in 1939, an incubator for many pop music stars of the 1940s and '50s, including Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest, and Kitty Kallen. Combined with James's superb musicianship, peerless trumpet technique and talented sidemen, this stellar group dominated the war years and the immediate post-war period.