Jerry Wexler: Crossing The Divide

GET JERRY WEXLER started on the big bands of the Thirties and Forties and you'll never hear the back of it. Most ageing music moguls have long since sloughed off any real love for music they started out with and sunk into a torpor of cocktails and daytime television. Not Wexler. Wrapped in his enormous hooded bathrobe, with the sea lapping against the jetty at the end of the garden, Wexler seeks solace from his favourite saxophonists – Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Ben Webster – long into the Florida night. Fifty years after first hearing them on 52nd Street he's still hero-worshipping them, still can't listen to Henry ‘Red’ Allen on ‘Meet Me In The Moonlight’ without wanting to cry.