29/12/2015

Today got 5 stars on Amazon!


Coming back today on the Amazon Best Jazz biographies section at 26°, the book has got its first five stars by a benevolent reader named Alan Giles. You can read his very long review here

He states that "the book is highly readable, and very worth while obtaining. I found it very interesting. Its author, Luca Ferrari has made a very credible attempt to make bricks without straw...".

An then: "I just wish a real jazz historian like Simon Spillett had written this work – when you read his biography of Tubby Hayes The Long Shadow of The Little Giant, you know the forensic work that went into it to make it impossible for anyone else ever to improve on it, for it's clarity and scrupulous fairness and honesty. With all due respect to Mr Ferrari, I would have tried to dig deeper, but I genuinely congratulate him on writing this book at all. My only quibble is the implication that he was mentally ill (“madness” is a word that crops up more than once). Unless depression and discontent has been reclassified thus, I don't believe he was".


Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm not Simon Spillet and this is just a book that tries to recover the life and the career of a great obscure musician. Usually the most famous jazz historians and writers/journalists of music are involved in other kind of biographies - John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Monk, Jarrett...
I'm an an Italian writer and I'm living in Italy, so usually I have some problems to make researches and get stuff for a book about an English musician... 

Then, I genuinely wish someone can improve this my work, I don't believe at all in that classic commonplace about "the definitive biography" about anyone...
This is my story of Mike Taylor. I hope in the future there will be many other stories about him written by others!


Updates:
on 30th December: the book is graded #71
on 31th December: #2 (!) then #11 
on January 1st: #55, then #65 

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