Digby Fairweather: On The Road With George Melly - The Final Bows Of A Legend

Digby Fairweather is one of Britain's finest jazz trumpeters, he is also an excellent broadcaster (theJazz), and a writer of huge talent who is fast becoming - like the late George Melly before him - a master of the memoir, as his own autobiography, Notes From A Jazz Life, and his biography of Nat Gonella (co-written with Ron Brown), A Life In Jazz, testify. But it's his latest book, On The Road With George Melly, where Fairweather the writer really seems to come into his own with a memoir that is wonderfully witty and a very moving tribute to that finest of renaissance men, George Melly, as this extract from the introduction shows...

" George Melly knew I was writing this book. 'With or without the help of Dr Smirnoff's' he twinkled - aware that mutual ingestion of our favoured drinks (mine Smirnoff's vodka, his Jameson's Irish whiskey) occasionally - though never permanently - tempered our feelings of firm mutual affection.

" I loved George of course. And writing this book about his last years - which at one point I was going to title Winding Up - was one way of returning a cherished favour. Back in 1965, while still a junior assistant in Southend on Sea's Central Library, I read his first volume of autobiography Owning Up - that now legendary account of his fourteen youthful years on the road with the uproarious, unrepentant Mick Mulligan band - and, until I turned jazz music into my profession twelve years later, the book became my behavioural vade-mecum; a raver's primer. Owning Up to Winding Up; well, it seemed reasonable."

In those two paragraphs Fairweather gives a wonderful, elegant, and well written (damned well written) flavour of the whole book, and one that should, and probably will be, the vade-mecum for a whole army of dedicated British jazz aficionados.

It's a great read.

Buy it.

Digby will also be appearing at The Stratford-upon-Avon International Festival of Literature
on Sunday 20th April at 1pm.

I shall be writing more about Digby's life and career at a later date.

Copyright 2008 Steve Newman