Timme Rosenkrantz, the author, was a young Danish baron, son of a distinguished family, and the first European journalist to cover New York's blossoming Harlem music scene during the period when jazz was urban America's popular music.
Baron Rosenkrantz was a dapper, 24-year-old redhead tipping his hat when he arrived by steamship in 1934 in New York— and a portly, ailing 58 when he died there in 1969, after some 20 voyages to his music mecca. During those years, he befriended, and was befriended by, nearly the entire Manhattan jazz community.
Long out of print, the original Danish paperback has 25 chapters and 127 pages, as opposed to the new Scarecrow Press hardback's 36 chapters and 329 pages. A number of photographs in the book were taken in Manhattan by the author with a Brownie box camera.
The big-band era was benevolently ruled by a self-appointed royal house. Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing," had several rivals for the jazz throne. Edward Kennedy Ellington was the undisputed Duke, while nobody challenged the title of Count. That belonged to the bandleader Bill Basie. Duke and Timme, who always came to his concerts, were close friends for decades.
Singer Peggy Lee was the Queen, and her fellow vocalist Billie Holiday was Lady Day. She invited Rosenkrantz home, and quickly became fond of him.
Louis Armstrong refused to be crowned, preferring to be called—and calling others—"Pops." That was how Timme and Louis addressed each other.
Rosenkrantz's paperback was adapted into English and edited by Fradley Garner, an American freelance writer based near Copenhagen, who met Rosenkrantz toward the end of the author's life. Garner worked from the original Danish book and an unpublished typescript, a free translation by Rosenkrantz and his life companion Inez Cavanaugh, a black Harlem journalist and singer.
One of many additions to the book is an introduction by Dan Morgenstern, a leading jazz historian and until recently director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Morgenstern was a young journalist when he met the author.
The “Blue Baron," Harry Freidman, led an American dance orchestra during the big-band era in the 1940s and early 1950s. He liked to dismiss it as a “Mickey Mouse band." Rosenkrantz, however, was a certified baron, who traced his noble roots back to the Rosencrantz (spelled with a “c" in England) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in Shakespeare's “Hamlet."
Living musicians and jazz writers in America and Europe, including three who knew the Danish author in the first half of the 20th century, have warmly endorsed his book.
