Elizabeth Vando

Blue Notes in Europe is part memoir, part biography, and part jazz history. Through twenty-one portraits, Fred van Doorn explores three generations of jazz greats, including Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, and John Coltrane.
Combining personal memories with careful research, he follows their careers, collaborations, and struggles, preserving the excitement of discovering their music as it first reached European record shops, radio programs, and concert halls.
For a generation growing up in postwar Europe, jazz meant freedom, modernity, and discovery. An imported Blue Note LP, expensive and beautifully designed, offered a connection to a distant world of clubs, recording studios, and extraordinary musicians. This book is a tribute to those musicians and the listeners whose lives they changed.