Being Prez - The Life and Music of Lester Young - Dave Gelly
‘Von Hangman is here’
Being Prez - The Life and Music of Lester Young - Dave Gelly
Dave Gelly [+]
Writer and Journalist
Dave Gelly writes about jazz in The Observer and other newspapers and journals. He has written and presented many features for BBC radio and hosted a weekly Radio Two show. He was a leading writer on the Sony Award-winning ten-part BBC radio series Sinatra: Voice of the Century and is the author of several books, including Masters of the Jazz Saxophone (Miller Freeman, 2000) and Stan Getz: Nobody Else but Me (Backbeat 2002). He was named Jazz Writer of the Year in the 1999 British Jazz Awards. Dave Gelly was appointed MBE in the 2005 New Years Honours.
Description
During his five weeks in Chicago, at the Hurricane Lounge, Lester met the woman who was to become his next wife. Her name was Mary Berkeley and she was African-American. Little is known about her life before they met, but by all accounts she was a quiet, calm person, the precise opposite of the volatile Mary Dale. They were married towards the end of 1946. Mary was just the kind of companion Lester needed at that stage in his life. His army days were behind him, but a legacy of bitterness and suspicion remained. He found it hard to trust people, especially white people whom he didn’t know well, and tended to avoid socializing if at all possible. He had, of course, always been shy.