The late jazz legend offers his memories of the jazz scene of the 1950s and his decline from drug use in the early 1960s

This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.

Told by the legendary trumpeter and singer himself, these memoirs launch wholeheartedly into the full-bodied and lush jazz-driven life that he led for more than 30 years.

Finally: the ultimate revised, updated, and expanded edition! Chet Baker was a star at 23 years old, winning the polls of America's leading magazines. But much of his later life was overshadowed by his drug use and problems with the law. 'Chet Baker: His Life and Music' was Baker's first biography, published a year after Baker's passing in 1988. It was available in five languages. Now Jeroen de Valk's thoroughly updated and expanded edition is finally here. De Valk spoke to Baker himself, his friends and colleagues, the police inspector who investigated his death, and many others. He read virtually every relevant word ever published about Chet and listened to every recording, issued or unissued. The result of all this is a book which clears up quite a few misunderstandings. Chet was not the 'washed-up' musician we saw in the 'documentary' Let's Get Lost. His death was not thát mysterious. According to De Valk, Chet was an incredible improviser, someone who could invent endless streams of melody. "He delivered these melodies with a highly individual, mellow sound. He turned his heart inside out, almost to the point of embarrassing his listeners." Jazz Times: "A solidly researched biography... a believable portrait of Baker... a number of enlightening interviews...." Library Journal: "De Valk's sympathetic yet gritty rendering of Baker's life blends well with his account of Baker's recording career." Cadence: "A classic of modern jazz biography. De Valk's writing is so straightforward as to be stark, yet this is just what makes it so rich." Jazzwise: "... it's going to be definitive." Jeroen de Valk (1958) is a Dutch musician and journalist. He also authored an acclaimed biography about tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

Now in paperback, this first oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements brings the sound of the punk generation chillingly to life with 50 new pages of depraved testimony. "Please Kill Me" reads like a fast-paced novel, but the tragedies it contains are all too human and all too real. photos.

Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame Bop drummer, composer, lyricist, and vocalist Artt Frank is one of the few authentic bop musicians on the scene today. He is best known for his friendship and professional association with trumpet immortal, Chet Baker, with whom he worked for many years. Michael Armando, jazz musician and President of MJA Records, says of Chet Baker: The Missing Years: A Memoir by Artt Frank, "Artt tells it like it was, what it was like being a friend and a drummer for this great legend Chet Baker ... When reading this book for the first time it is almost like you are being drawn into a time warp going back into time. Artt Frank takes you from the dark back alleys of drugs and despair to the shinning genius of Chet's playing smoke filled clubs and the streets ... If you are a musician you will cherish it after reading it. Non-musicians will learn how great Chet Baker was and how great a friend drumming great Artt Frank was to Chet. The truth will set you free and Artt Frank has done this with his memoir. Amen... I give this book 10 stars..." As reviewed by premiere jazz journalist and critic, Doug Ramsey, this memoir ..".shows us sides of the great trumpeter that few people knew. In gripping detail, he [Artt] tells of the well-known drama in Baker's life-the sudden fame, the struggle with drugs, the effects of a beating that almost ended his career. But Artt gives us new insights into Chet's warmth, his love of family, his steely determination and the early emergence of his astonishing talent...This is a book of revelations." "Chet Baker: The Missing Years is perhaps the most accurate account of Chet's life and true spirit to date. Superbly written by Artt Frank ... the book gives fresh insight into the man behind the music. A must-read for everyone from the casual jazz fan to the serious student of jazz history." -- JB Dyas, PhD, VP, Education and Curriculum Development, Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Shampoo meets You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again in a rollicking and riveting memoir from the woman who for decades styled Hollywood's most celebrated players. I was living a hairdresser’s dream. I was making my mark in this all-male field. My appointment book was filled with more and more celebrities. And I was becoming competition for my heroes... Behind the scenes of every Hollywood photo shoot, TV appearance, and party in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, there was Carrie White. As the “First Lady of Hairdressing,” Carrie collaborated with Richard Avedon on shoots for Vogue, partied with Jim Morrison, gave Sharon Tate her California signature style, and got high with Jimi Hendrix. She has counted Jennifer Jones, Betsy Bloomingdale, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, and Camille Cosby among her favorite clients. But behind the glamorous facade, Carrie’s world was in perpetual disarray and always had been. After her father abandoned the family when she was still a child, she was sexually abused by her domineering stepfather, and her alcoholic mother was unstable and unreliable. Carrie was sipping cocktails before her tenth birthday, and had had five children and three husbands before her twenty-eighth. She fueled the frenetic pace of her professional life with a steady diet of champagne and vodka, diet pills, cocaine, and heroin, until she eventually lost her home, her car, her career—and nearly her children. But she battled her way back, getting sober, rebuilding her relationships and her reputation as a hairdresser, and the name Carrie White was back on the door of one of Beverly Hills’s most respected salons. An unflinching portrayal of addiction and recovery, Upper Cut proves that even in Hollywood, sometimes you have to fight for a happy ending.

This month-by-month chronology offers fascinating insight into the life of this most charismatic of jazz musicians.

A novel set in the 60's by a writer who lived through them.