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The Jazzmen - An Evening with Larry Tye

A discussion of Larry Tye's new book The Jazzmen

Join the Library and Politics and Prose bookstore for a conversation with author Larry Tye about his new book The Jazzmen. In conversation with WAMU's Rob Bamberger, Tye will discuss his exciting new biography of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. 

Books will be available for sale and signing after the talk.

About the Book

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

• Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.
• Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.
• William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller. What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

About the Author

Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod. 

About the Conversation Partner

Rob Bamberger’s interest in vintage jazz and swing began in 1963 at an elementary school book fair in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he picked over the remainders on the record table after the crowd had dispersed. There, he found a two-record set from RCA Victor of broadcast performances by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. That fateful acquisition, which cost him a dime, launched a consuming and scholarly interest in American music of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. It also became the cornerstone of a record collection which overwhelms his basement, his laundry room, and threatens to creep up the stairs of the Arlington home he shares with his wife, Chris.

Bamberger came to WAMU 88.5 as a volunteer in 1978, when he presented the first of several features on jazz performers during the station’s morning news show, Morning Line. Hot Jazz Saturday Night debuted in 1980 and aired on WAMU until 2018, before returning to the station in 2020. Bamberger’s program had the distinction of being the only non-syndicated, locally-produced public radio program to be part of NPR’s international distribution from 2006 to 2017.

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