Jazz industry icon Lorraine Gordon will get to tell her life story to jazz fans everywhere on Dec. 20 in the new memoir Alive at The Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time. Told by Gordon to Barry Singer, who has written for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, the memoir will document highlights of Gordon’s career and lifetime commitment to jazz.
As detailed in excerpts used in the book’s press release, Gordon was obsessed with jazz from adolescence. She married Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion in 1942, where they began “selling something fabulous.” Five years later, she discovered icon Thelonious Monk, and then in 1950 married Village Vanguard proprietor Max Gordon.
It was that marriage that would change her life and cement her place in the jazz community. When Max passed away in 1989, Lorraine took over at the Vanguard: “I didn’t arrive at The Village Vanguard out of the blue. I stuck to what I loved…I loved jazz. And what I loved was terrific,” reads an excerpt. In a special Carnegie Hall concert June 19, Gordon was honored for her dedication to the Vanguard, now the most enduring jazz club in the U.S. (follow the hyperlink to Bill Milkowski’s Jazztimes.com concert review).
Alive at The Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time will be released by Hal Leonard and retails for $27.95.
Originally Published