Overview

This edition of Historical Jazz Conversations was revised in 2026 with updates and rearrangement of select sections. Legendary names. Names that helped create and shape this music we call jazz. I'm deeply blessed because each of these musical legends and others have sat with me on my local New York Cable TV show in a one -on- one conversation. My show airs every week on NYC's Public Access TV Station MNN, and is shown worldwide on the internet. (The JaRon Eames show, which debuted in 1994, is still running as this book goes to press in winter 2015). These wonderful souls told my audience and me stories about their lives and their thoughts on the music and life. These are many of the authentic creators of a dying genre of music artistry- a once great music steeped in soul, swing, and gutsy blues, filled with blood, sweat, and tears. You used to be able to hear it in every turn of a phrase from the musicians and singers of ""yesteryears, days I knew as happy sweet sequester days- oh dem days ... golden days, days of mad romance and love"" -as Lady Day sang. Authentic swing, and black soul, pain, love, hurt, adventure, life lived and deferred. When Jazz was young, it seemed to be a vaccine to white racism, something of an internal therapy shared with the world. Blacks created Jazz/Blues in a time so brutal and vile in American history, perhaps just to keep from going completely mad and to do something the oppressor could not do. All of the roots and seasoning of jazz/blues came from Blacks. Which became God's gift to the world. The white musicians played it, following a tradition that was set by African American musicians who came before them. And many of them over the years can swing. Sho Nuff. But it was a different time, and Jazz wasn't taught in universities as it is today; it was learned in whore houses, juke joints, black ghettos, back alleys, slums, crap games, and pool halls. It had a stench of reality. Today's jazz is very polite and has a sound of gentrification. I, for one, don't want jazz to grow, change, or evolve. It is what it is, Jazz. One wouldn't expect the music of Mozart or Rachmaninoff to evolve. Why should the music of Ellington, Basie, Coltrane, and Armstrong evolve? I'm one who strongly believes in presenting old classic material to a new audience that has never been exposed to it... Slow curtain... the end. Please continue to teach it in schools, by all means, and hopefully, the realness will come from life experiences over time.

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Reviews

""I have so enjoyed this book. Your interviews are polished, professional, and very informed, and the book you compiled of jazz conversations is a joy to peruse. You seem to have learned the valuable secret of how to get people to open up candidly by making them feel comfortable. As a result, the rapport you established with your subjects is enviable. - Rex Reed

Author Information

JaRon was born in Baton Rouge La, December 21st, 1953 to the kind of prominent family that W.E.B. DuBois publicized in his essays, 'The Talented Tenth'.After graduating high school in 1971 and one year of college at Southern University, in 1972 he moved to NYC to follow his dream of becoming an entertainer. He worked for Japan Airlines on fifth Avenue in NYC from 1973-1977 and after traveling many places around the world he left the airlines to devote his life to Jazz. JaRon has been performing on stages for over 35 years. He is the host, producer of the longest running weekly Jazz TV show in History preserving and archiving many of the authentic legends of Jazz. (The JaRon Eames Show). On his show the masters of this music genre can tell their stories uncensored. He is currently at work on a documentary called Historical Jazz Conversations based on years of priceless footage from his television program. His upcoming book is called: 'TAINTED'. A most shocking truthful story of sex, corruption, drugs, alcohol betrayal, racism, rampant incompetence, prison, vestiges of McCarthyism, and a corrupt judicial system run amok. But in the end gratitude, survival, redemption, surrendering, and real peace Legendary Jazz Historian

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