Jazz Changes

Jazz Changes is the late Martin Williams’s third and perhaps best collection of jazz portraits, interviews, narrative accounts of recording sessions, rehearsals, and performances, important liner notes, and far reaching discussions of musicians and their music. The collection includes thirty years of Williams’s finest pieces taking readers on an engaging tour of the changing jazz world. There are appreciation-profiles and comments on such performers as Ross Russell–about the noted Dial Record sessions with Charlie Parker–and greats like John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, Ornette Coleman, Dinah Washington, and Thelonious Monk. Williams also offers parodies of how jazz critics in 1965 might have assessed the Beatles, and reflections on the Ellington era. He concludes with an elegant plea for critics to pay attention to jazz history, always exhibiting his keen mind and gifted pen.