Mike Zwerin was an American cool jazz musician and author.
20 Facts About Mike Zwerin
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Mike Zwerin was active within the jazz and progressive jazz musical community as a session musician.
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Mike Zwerin found a way to pursue both his interests as an author living in New York, where he was born, and his passion for music by taking positions as a broadcaster, and other journalistic and media positions while maintaining his musical career as well.
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Mike Zwerin was the Paris-based jazz critic for the International Herald Tribune for 21 years, then later for Bloomberg News.
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Mike Zwerin died at the age of 79 in Paris on April 2,2010.
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Michael Mike Zwerin was born into an affluent family in Queens, New York City, United States, where his father was president of the Capitol Steel Corporation.
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Mike Zwerin studied at the High School of Music and Art, and began leading bands in his teens, in which he employed several up-and-coming musicians.
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At the age of 18, while on his summer holidays from the University of Miami, Mike Zwerin was the trombonist in Miles Davis's nonet at the Royal Roost club in New York This band was famously to record its music the following year in the album that became immortalized as Birth of the Cool, but by then Zwerin had graduated and gone into his father's steel business.
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Mike Zwerin abandoned his musical life for much of the 1950s but after a spell in France he returned to New York in 1958 and played the trombone in several big bands.
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Mike Zwerin combined this with jazz, and worked in John Lewis's big band Orchestra USA, with whom he recorded and directed a small group.
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Mike Zwerin later worked briefly with the pianist Earl Hines.
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Mike Zwerin was spotted by Miles Davis at Minton's in Harlem, while sitting in with Art Blakey.
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Mike Zwerin was immediately drafted into the rehearsal band for what become known as Birth of the Cool, while the regular trombonist Kai Winding was indisposed.
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Mike Zwerin appears on Archie Shepp's 1968 album The Magic of Ju-Ju.
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Mike Zwerin moved to London in 1969 and then, in 1972, to Paris, which would be his home for the rest of his life.
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Mike Zwerin was charged with disturbing the peace, but charges against Mike Zwerin and the other journalists were later dropped due to lack of evidence.
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Mike Zwerin wrote several books about his own life in the world of jazz, most notably Close Enough for Jazz and The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir.
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Mike Zwerin translated the jazz writings of Boris Vian, who was, like Zwerin, both writer and musician.
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Mike Zwerin spent two years researching La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis.
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Mike Zwerin traveled across France, Austria, Poland, and Germany to interview survivors and analyze how jazz was banned by the Nazi government as "degenerate music" Zwerin issued an expanded version of La Tristesse de Saint Louis as Swing Under the Nazis in 2000.