Detective duo Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne are back, complete now with First-Born, a collection of cuddly toys and a child-minder called Yvonne. This third Beiderbecke novel follows The Beiderbecke Affair and The Beiderbecke Tapes.

With as little plot as its creator Alan Plater could get away with and as much jazz as he could manage, the 1985 television drama The Beiderbecke Affair had a far-reaching impact, inspiring sequels, novels, albums and even jazz tours. Much like its Bix Beiderbecke-style soundtrack, Plater's quietly joyous drama was unconventional, free: its narrative following the lives and relationships of its leading characters – teachers-turned-amateur detectives Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) and Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) – with a gentle, whimsical humour. William Gallagher's illuminating study is the first critical account of this much-loved series. Drawing on interviews with cast members and musicians, the production team and Yorkshire TV executives, as well as on insights from Plater himself, Gallagher explores Beiderbecke's origins in Plater's 1981 tv drama Get Lost! before moving on to an in-depth analysis of the series itself, to reveal why such an unassuming series remains one of the best-loved examples of British television drama. The book also includes a previously unpublished BBC Radio 4 short story featuring the character of Jill Swinburne, 'A Brief Encounter with Richard Wagner'.

Bix Beiderbecke was one of the first great legends of jazz. Among the most innovative cornet soloists of the 1920s and the first important white player, he invented the jazz ballad and pointed the way to “cool” jazz. But his recording career lasted just six years; he drank himself to death in 1931—at the age of twenty-eight. It was this meteoric rise and fall, combined with the searing originality of his playing and the mystery of his character—who was Bix? not even his friends or family seemed to know—that inspired subsequent generations to imitate him, worship him, and write about him. It also provoked Brendan Wolfe’s Finding Bix a personal and often surprising attempt to connect music, history, and legend. A native of Beiderbecke’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa, Wolfe grew up seeing Bix’s iconic portrait on everything from posters to parking garages. He never heard his music, though, until cast to play a bit part in an Italian biopic filmed in Davenport. Then, after writing a newspaper review of a book about Beiderbecke, Wolfe unexpectedly received a letter from the late musician's nephew scolding him for getting a number of facts wrong. This is where Finding Bix begins: in Wolfe's good-faith attempt to get the facts right. What follows, though, is anything but straightforward, as Wolfe discovers Bix Beiderbecke to be at the heart of furious and ever-timely disputes over addiction, race and the origins of jazz, sex, and the influence of commerce on art. He also uncovers proof that the only newspaper interview Bix gave in his lifetime was a fraud, almost entirely plagiarized from several different sources. In fact, Wolfe comes to realize that the closer he seems to get to Bix, the more the legend retreats.

"Bix Beiderbecke is a figure of legend: the white cornetist's short life (1903-1931) fit the myth of the tragic artist, surrounded by the nostalgia of an era (Prohibition), and rooted in the dark history of jazz. Considered a genius by his fans and fellow musicians, Bix was a master cornet player, pianist, and composer, and one of the most inspiring jazz musicians of his age." "French jazz scholar Jean Pierre Lion traveled the trajectory of Bix's life, from birth to death, to boarding school, on tour, and beyond, to uncover the truth behind the legend. He creates historical ambience with descriptions of 1920s Chicago - ruled by Al Capone and peopled with fast cars, flappers, and hot jazz musicians - and Bix's personality is revealed through excerpts from the few letters he wrote in his lifetime and the memories of friends and witnesses of the jazz age." "When he died, Bix left behind a tremendous list of recordings (included here in a definitive discography) and several original compositions. This biography culls the entirety of Bix scholarship into one volume, painting a complete picture of the man, his music, and his times."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

By 1929, the brief, brilliant career of Bix Beiderbecke -- self-taught cornetist, pianist, and composer -- had already become legend. As his genius blazed forth with a strange, doomed incandescence, Bix's career tragically reflected the chaotic impulses of a country suddenly awash in wealth, power, and a profound cynicism. Shy and inarticulate, Bix was beloved by both the raccoon-coated campus crowd and the men who nightly played alongside him. He is still celebrated in a yearly festival in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa. And that is where this novel begins, Davenport at the Bix Fest. Then it travels back in time to focus on the highlights of a meteoric career: at a Capone-controlled nightclub in 1926; the grueling cross-country tours with Paul Whiteman's "Symphonic Jazz" orchestra; the disastrous Whiteman trip to California to make the first all-color musical talkie; the stock market crash of 1929, which finds Bix in an asylum, victim of the era's signature product, bootleg gin; and finally, Bix's dying efforts to combine his piano compositions into a suite that would be the pinnacle of his life's work. Colored by some of the age's most popular characters -- Maurice Ravel, Bing Crosby, Al Capone, Duke Ellington and Clara Bow -- 1929 brilliantly illuminates a period in history, personified in the gifted, compelling and melancholy figure of Bix Beiderbecke. Book jacket.

This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.