Bobby Hackett

Jazz musician Bobby Hackett - 'one of the finest natural musicians in the business' according to Muggsy Spanier - began his career in the 1930s; it ended with his death in 1976. An extensively researched discography of the vast number of recorded sessions in which Hackett took part during these decades forms the essential core of this substantial book. It is prefaced with the fascinating biographical insights gathered from the articles, reviews, news stories, meetings and interviews which the editors accumulated as they worked, and illustrated throughout with contemporary photographs, advertising, and record labels and covers. Detailed indexes feature both the famous and the influential - Louis Armstrong, Eddie Condon, Jackie Gleason, Horace Heidt, Glenn Miller, Lee Wiley among them - and the lesser-known working musicians and artists of the era.Prompted by Hackett's death, this work of research started with hand-written index cards, and progressed through typewriters and several generations of word processors and computer operating systems; its publication is a realisation not only of Bobby Hackett's life in music, and place in a period of musical history, but also of an enthusiasm sustained through personal acquisitions, friendships and travel - and listening to a lot of jazz!

George Hulme (1930-2017), a contributor of discographies, articles, and photographs to periodicals, including Discophile, Matrix, Jazz Journal, Jazz Monthly, and Coda. He was editor of Matrix Jazz Record Magazine from 1958 to its closure in 1976 and, for more than 20 years, of Red Bank Special, the magazine of the International Count Basie Society. He was a major contributor to Jazz Records 1942- (Jepson edition) and 1962- (Raben edition). Outside jazz, he was a technical writer and publisher. Bert Whyatt (1920-2013) bought his first jazz record at the age of 16. The author of Muggsy Spanier: The Lonesome Road (A Biography and Discography), Jazzology Press (1995), and, with Sonny McGown, The Jump Records story: A discography, IAJRC (2006), he contributed over 800 articles to jazz magazines between 1952 and 2013. Some of his life outside jazz is told in Jazz: So Much In My Life, The Grimsay Press (2014).