About this Book

"There could be no better symbol for the illicit mystery and poignant impermanence of jazz than the cigarette smoke in a Herman Leonard photograph. Spiralling, billowing, hanging and twisting into shapes of oriental delicacy, the smoke is the perfect prop for the beautiful and sometimes tragic faces at the centre of his night scenes. Herman Leonard was around the jazz world--with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at Birdland, with Dinah Washington and Gerry Mulligan at Newport, with Erroll Garner and Stan Getz in the recording studio--in the Forties and Fifties, long before anyone thought that nicotine needed government warnings.