Val Wilmer is an internationally acclaimed photographer, journalist, author and black music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. In that time she has interviewed and photographed almost every significant figure in post-war jazz, blues and R&B, from Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler via Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin. As a photographer, her work features in the permanent collections of the British Library, the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery; as a writer and historian, she has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography and the New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz. She lives in London.
The best of those books that found evidence of a black revolution or resurgence in the musical achievements of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and others * Guardian * Exceptionally illuminating... one of the relatively few indispensable books about America's classical music * Nat Hentoff ?A very powerful and proud Black book... it sings the praise-song of the procreators of the new music and their direct descendents? Coda *