"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." - CHARLIE PARKER

"What is jazz? The rhythm - the feeling." - COLEMAN HAWKINS

"The best sound usually comes the firs time you do something. If it's spontaneous, it's going to be rough, not clean, but it's going to have the spirit which is the essence of jazz." - DAVE BRUBECK

Here, in their own words, such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Bunk Johnson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Clarence Williams, Jo Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Billy Holiday, and many others, recall the birth, growth and changes in jazz over the years. From its beginnings at the turn of the century in the red-light district in New Orleans (or Storyville as it became to be known), to Chicago's Downtown section and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Chicago's South Side, to jazz sessions in Kansas City, to Harlem during the depression years, the West Coast and modern developments, the story of jazz is vividly and colourfully documented in hundreds of personal interviews, letters, tape recordings and telephone conversations, and excerpts from previously printed articles that appeared in books and magazines.

There is no more fascinating and lively history of jazz than this first-hand telling by the men who made it.

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