Leonard Feather

Leonard Feather
File:Robert Goffin, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, Leonard Feather 1942.jpg Robert Goffin, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, and Leonard Feather (L to R) in 1942
Background information
Birth name	Leonard Geoffrey Feather
Born	(1914-09-13)13 September 1914
Origin	London, England
Died	Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Journalist Composer
Instruments	Piano

Leonard Geoffrey Feather (13 September 1914 – 22 September 1994) was a British-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer who was best known for his music journalism and other writing.

Biography

Feather was born in London into a strictly conformist upper middle-class Jewish family. He learned to play the piano and clarinet without formal training and started writing about jazz and film by his late teens. At age of twenty-one, Feather made his first visit to the United States, and after working in the U.K. and the U.S. as a record producer finally settled in New York City in 1939, where he lived until moving to Los Angeles in 1960. Feather was co-editor of Metronome magazine and served as chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times until his death.

Feather's compositions have been widely recorded, including "Evil Gal Blues" and "Blowtop Blues" by Dinah Washington, and what is possibly his biggest hit, "How Blue Can You Get?" by blues artists Louis Jordan and B. B. King. But it was as a writer on jazz (as a journalist, critic, historian, and campaigner) that he made his biggest mark: "Feather was for a long time the most widely read and most influential writer on jazz." Even jazz enthusiasts who didn't read his books and articles would have known him from the liner notes that he wrote for hundreds of jazz albums.

He wrote the lyrics to the jazz song "Whisper Not", which were recorded by Ella Fitzgerald on her 1966 Verve release of the same name.

Feather died in Sherman Oaks, California at age eighty. He was the father of lyricist and songwriter Lorraine Feather.

Bibliography

• 1956: The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz (Horizon)
  • 1993 reprint (Da Capo) ISBN 0-306-80529-4
• 1963: Laughter from the Hip co-written with Jack Tracy (Da Capo) ISBN 978-0-306-80092-4
• 1966: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties
• 1977: Inside Jazz (Da Capo) ISBN 0-306-80076-4
• 1977: Pleasures of Jazz (Delacorte) ISBN 0-385-28786-0
• 1987: From Satchmo to Miles (Da Capo) ISBN 1-4176-1892-2
• 1987: Encyclopedic Yearbook of Jazz reprint (Da Capo) ISBN 0-306-76289-7
• 1987: The Jazz Years — Earwitness to an Era (Da Capo)
• 1988: Book of Jazz (Horizon) ISBN 0-8180-1202-1
• 1999: The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz co-written with Ira Gitler, second (revised) edition (Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-507418-1
• 2000: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Discography

• 1937–1945: Leonard Feather 1937–1945 (Classics)
• 1951: Leonard Feather's Swingin' Swedes (Prestige)
• 1954: Dixieland vs. Birdland (MGM)
• 1954: Cats Vs. Chicks (MGM)
• 1954: Winter Sequence (MGM)
• 1956: West Coast vs. East Coast (MGM)
• 1956: Swingin' on the Vibories (MGM)
• 1957: Hi-Fi Suite (MGM)
• 1957: 52nd Street (VSOP)
• 1958: Swingin' Seasons (MGM)
• 1959: Jazz from Two Sides (Concept)
• 1971: Night Blooming Jazzmen featuring Kittie Doswell (Mainstream)
• 1971: Freedom Jazz Dance (Mainstream)
• 1971–1972: Night Blooming (Mainstream)
• 1972: All-Stars (Mainstream)
• 1997: Presents Bop (Tofrec)

With Langston Hughes

• Weary Blues (MGM, 1959)

External links

• The Leonard Feather Collection, part of the International Jazz Collections at the University of Idaho Library
• The Leonard Feather Scrapbooks
• Leonard Feather — brief biography by Scott Yanow, for AllMusic.
• Carr, Ian, Digby Fairweather, & Brian Priestley. Jazz: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides. ISBN 1-85828-528-3
• Richard Cook & Brian Morton. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD 6th edition. ISBN 0-14-051521-6
• Leonard Feather pianist and producer appearing on Donald H. Gabor's Continental 78 RPM Jazz Records