Mike Zwerin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Mike Zwerin (May 18, 1930 – April 2, 2010) was an American cool jazz trombonist, bass trumpeter, and author born in New York, who is possibly best known for his work with Miles Davis in 1948 as part of his Birth of the Cool band. Additionally, Zwerin also worked with Maynard Ferguson, Claude Thornhill, and Bill Russo, among many others.
Zwerin was also the Paris-based jazz critic for the International Herald Tribune for 21 years, then later for Bloomberg News.
Zwerin's lasting claim to fame, however, is, perhaps, not his trombone playing but his book La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis (1985) which unearthes the story of how jazz was banned by the Nazis as "Degenerate music," and yet somehow survived as what Zwerin called "a metaphor for freedom".
