RAMSEY, Jr., Frederic. A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records. New York: Long Player Publications, Inc., 1954.

First edition, signed by over 35 jazz luminaries including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Lester Young, Bud Powell, Count Basie, Eddie Condon, and a trio of drummers in Max Roach, Gene Krupa and Shelley Manne, the autographs acquired at gigs in Boston and New York in the mid 1950s by Evelyn M. Glidden of Watertown, Massachusetts, who had a brief entanglement with Bud Powell in 1956.

Powell’s biographer relates that when touring ‘there were plenty of times when Powell was left alone in these faraway clubs. He made a sad picture, sitting alone at a table, staring off, whiling away the time until the next set. He was most often perceived in this context to be a nonperson, just a machine that lay idle until it was cranked up again to function at the keyboard. But on one of these nights, a jazz novice saw not a machine in disuse but a lonely person. Glidden, a recent Business and Engineering Management graduate, had been deeply impressed by Powell’s performance.’ Apparently the two got talking and Glidden declined Powell’s advances, later writing to his manager Oscar Goodstein that ‘ “here [was] the spectacle of a great pianist whose brain it seemed had been injured and who therefore could not play with his full brilliance”’. Here, Powell has signed ‘Earl Powell (Bud)’ and Glidden has dated their meeting ‘Jan 10 ‘56’. In May 1956, Gidden journeyed to New York to see him play at Birdland, but ‘they had a misunderstanding… and she walked out of the club… It must have been clear to both of them that this fantasy couldn’t continue, but her compassion marked her as more than an average fan’. Pullman, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell, 2012.

Octavo (216 x 146 mm). The majority of signatories signing next to their respective entries in the book. 16 plates of halftone illustrations. Original black cloth, spine lettered in blue, with dust jacket. Bookstamp of Evelyn M. Glidden to front free endpaper and her handwritten indexing notes to rear free endpaper. Provenance: RR Auctions, Boston, 10 February 2010, lot 780.

[With:] – Chicago Documentary. Portrait of a Jazz Era. London: Jazz Sociological Society, 1944. Octavo, wire-stitched in the original pictorial wraps