A Jazzman’s Tale. A screenplay memoir of 1950s jazz trumpeter and pianist Charles Freeman Lee

Item

A Jazzman’s Tale. A screenplay memoir of 1950s jazz trumpeter and pianist Charles Freeman Lee
Middletown
Self-published
2021
eng
https://www.ajazzmanstale.com/a-jazzmans-tale-the-screenplay/
A Jazzman’s Tale is a screenplay memoir. Why a screenplay memoir? Because it’s about jazz and otherwise, one needs too many words to explain too many things.


A Jazzman’s Tale comes straight, no chaser from the jazzman himself. It hopes to entertain, inform and give context to an important era of jazz – bebop in 1950s New York. Like any other jazz publication, A Jazzman’s Tale is based on the words of the jazzman himself and research.
The content is dramatized so as not to intimidate the unschooled jazz fan who may be intimidated by dense academic tomes and may simply want to read a fun story set in a jazz era. Of course, academic jazz tomes have their place – they just do not make jazz fun again!
A Jazzman’s Tale grew from an interview by the writer with jazz trumpeter and pianist Charles Freeman Lee in Paris, France in 1993. Struck by Freeman’s playing, language, mannerisms, and style in Paris, the author recognized him as jazzman from another time. He agreed to share his life story and it became A Jazzman’s Tale.
A Jazzman’s Tale follows Freeman’s pursuit on trumpet in New York City, back to his Ohio origins and his university’s Wilberforce Collegians, a university band in the tradition of African American universities.
Wilberforce Collegians produced other notable alumni Frank Foster, George Russell, Snooky Young, Benny Carter, Norris Turney, and Tiny Bradshaw and many others. As he begins to make it on trumpet in New York, he falls in love with Jenny, wife of vibraharpist Milt Jackson, before his days with the Modern Jazz Quartet. After a short detour to the military, Freeman and Jenny get together and marry in Acapulco.
At specific plot points in A Jazzman’s Tale, we are treated to verbatim excerpts of the Paris interview with Freeman from 1992, five years before his death. The interview is replete with jazz slang and improvisational storytelling – adding another layer of texture to the narrative of this screenplay memoir. After many twists and turns, including stints in Riker’s Island – with other jazz musicians who perform in a show for the Rikers’ staff – Freeman loses his beloved Jenny to early death and laments the other lost jazzmen.
9781544648910

Source of record

This item was submitted on April 26, 2021 by Laurent Cugny using the form “Livre” on the site “BiblioJazz”: https://bibliojazz-collegium-musicae.huma-num.fr/s/bibliojazz