Imbued with an insatiable love of music, Hammond had a knack for unearthing the next great artist, not just the next big thing, although under his tutelage the two were rarely mutually exclusive. In a concise, lively narrative, Prial details Hammond's innumerable contributions to American music, as well as an unflagging devotion to civil rights and social change.
Born to privilege in 1910, Hammond was raised on New York's Upper East Side in a home awash in music. Yet it wasn't the classical compositions permeating his family's five-story mansion that would shape Hammond's life. His inspiration came in the basement, where the family's black servants listened to early jazz and blues records. Recalling their emotional reactions to the songs, Hammond later said it was ``his first exposure to the visceral power that popular music could wield," Prial writes.
By the time he was 10, he was taking an uptown bus to Harlem to buy his own ``race" records and hear such singers as the great Bessie Smith . Later, much to the chagrin of his father, he dropped out of Yale University to pursue a career in music. Because money was hardly an issue, Hammond was able to completely devote himself to his passions, which also included writing for such publications as the Nation, Down Beat , and Melody Maker .
But he always found time to hit the nightclubs. In 1933, he strolled into a Harlem speakeasy and heard Holiday, then an unknown teenage chanteuse, singing ``Wouldja for a Big Red Apple?" She was Hammond's first great find, and serendipity certainly played a role that glorious night.
Yet Hammond was also a visionary, never more so than when he encouraged -- well, hectored -- clarinetist Benny Goodman into hiring Teddy Wilson , a black, classically trained pianist (and another Hammond discovery), for his trio in 1935. Their public appearances, the first by an integrated band, were a bellwether in the fight against segregation.
