An enthusiastic champion of then-unknown musical talent (Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan), as well as racial integration, John Hammond left a huge mark on 20th-century culture. Dunstan Prial tempers his glowing Hammond portrait (''The smile...it just kinda washed all over you,'' said Bruce Springsteen, one of his last discoveries) with well-researched accounts of personal conflicts with jazz greats such as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Intersections with everyone from Count Basie to Medgar Evers unfold like a real-life Forrest Gump, except Hammond was no slo-mo Everyman. Indeed, this authoritative bio's title, The Producer, is a misnomer: Hammond was less a record producer than a visionary.
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