I wrote about the new Tadd Dameron biography here on February 21, his 96th birthday anniversary, and featured his music that night in Jazz a la Mode. I was impressed by the numbers of listeners who dropped a line during the show, mostly to say that Tadd’s recordings with Fats Navarro were part of their informal jazz education in the ’60’s and ’70’s, but they’d tended to overlook him since, only to be reminded now of the great music he’d made back in the day.
The biography, Dameronia: The Life and Music of Tadd Dameron, was written by Paul Combs, a saxophonist who makes his home in Cambridge. NPR’s Tom Vitale reported on the book on Saturday’s All Things Considered, and you can hear it here. Vitale spoke with Combs, and with Ira Gitler, the veteran jazz critic who chronicled Dameron’s career and visited him near the end of his life. The report also features excerpts from the only recorded interview with Tadd, which was conducted by disc jockey Harry Frost in 1952. There you’ll hear Dameron in his own voice describing what makes his music sound so good: “I try to make it flow, like a book, cohesively.”
(Tadd Dameron and Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records; photos by William Gottlieb)