LEONARD FEATHER
Genres: Hard Bop, Swing, Stride Piano • United Kingdom

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 the Metronome magazine and served as chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times until his death. He died in Sherman Oaks, California at age eighty. 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, and some of his own read more...