Swing, Hard Bop, Bop & Bebop

Horace Mungin grew up in San Juan Hill, in New York City. It is a neighborhood with a long involvement in the creation, celebration and unconventional embracing of music - jazz music - and Thelonious Monk lived there. The young boys on the basketball court heard Monk and Charlie Rouse rehearsing live some Saturday mornings as their music sailed from Monk's open window at 238 West 63rd Street over to the basketball court around the corner and they often saw jazz musicians in the neighborhood on their way to Monk's crib. Other teens collected baseball cards and kept up on hit/run statistics; Mungin's clique collected jazz facts; what musicians were in town and who was at Birdland, and who was playing Grant's Tomb on the Jazz Mobile. They knew the list of sidemen; they knew who played bass or drums with which major headliner. Mungin has turned that experience and a life-time of collecting jazz music and jazz facts into a series of succinct biographical guides of swing and bebop artists for all jazz fans to savor.