Background
Feather was born in London into a strictly conformist upper middle-class Jewish family.
composer executive fiction writer historian journalist pianist jazz musician
Feather was born in London into a strictly conformist upper middle-class Jewish family.
University College London.
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 United Kingdom and the United States. 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.
1963: Laughter from the Hip co-written with Jack Tracy (Da Capo)
1966: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties
1977: Inside Jazz (Da Capo)
1977: Pleasures of Jazz (Delacorte)
1987: From Satchmo to Miles (Da Capo)
1987: Encyclopedic Yearbook of Jazz reprint (Da Capo)
1987: The Jazz Years — Earwitness to an Era (Da Capo)
1988: Book of Jazz (Horizon)
1999: The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz co-written with Ira Gitler, second (revised) edition (Oxford University Press)
2000: Oxford Dictionary of National.