This is an excerpt from Lionel Grigson's Jazz Chord Book, my favourite collection of jazz changes. I discovered this book when I was a shy sixteen year old on school holidays in Hastings, East Sussex, where I followed the town's rich but mostly unattended bebop scene. The musicians I watched (nursing a pint of Guinness, hoping I might be asked to sit in, as long as it was on something simple) all played from Lionel's book; one of them, the 'doughty bopper' Pete Burden, is namechecked in the introduction. Liane Carroll, an excellent pianist and singer who filled the small, empty rooms with passionate lyrics and scats, delivered in an uncompromisingly transatlantic accent, was the star of the scene. I see she won two BBC Jazz Awards last year, and that excerpts from her last two albums are available to download.

Just like these south coast luminaries, I covered my copy of LGJCB in brown paper, and although it didn't get much wear in the first few years, I'm glad I was such an impressionable youth. The third edition is still available from Jazzwise Publicatons, but it's a sad replica of the first two; Lionel's careful, legible handwriting has been replaced with crude typesetting, and many of his precious alternative progressions were dropped to fit the format. If you have a copy of the second edition, maybe you could help me digitise it for future generations.