Jerry Jazz Musician, the online magazine, interviewed me at length this month about Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography-in-the-making:
I guess you could call me an intellectual, although I don’t write just for intellectuals, or in a sense even for intellectuals. I just write for people, for folks, and while this Armstrong book–like the Mencken book before it–will be the product of a lot of scholarly inquiry and knowledge and thinking, I want the end product to be something that my mother can read. I want to explain Louis to her in the light of all of the technical things that I know about him, but I want that technical superstructure to be completely disassembled, packed and put away. In the end, the book should be a story, the story of a remarkable man, totally accessible to the reader who is not a musician, scholar or intellectual, but who simply wants to learn about him….
Read the whole thing here.