Jazz People

by Valerie Wilmer

Valerie Wilmer’s 1970 classic, Jazz People, has long been considered one of the three or four finest books ever written on jazz. Featuring extensive interviews with fourteen jazz geniuses, including Art Farmer, Cecil Taylor, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Big Joe Turner, and Archie Shepp, Wilmer captures the essential qualities of each artist in her interviews, providing deeply moving portraits–in words and in photographs–of the often troubling lives of the musicians who changed the shape of jazz in the fifties and sixties.