Flying High: A Jazz Life and Beyond

Peter King's book ranks among the great jazz autobiographies. One of the world's leading alto saxophonists, he tells his story with searing honesty, reveaqling the obsessions and motivations that have driven him and the dilemmas of surviving as a top creative musician in an often inhospitable world. With unsparing self-ysis he describes the traumas that accompanied his brilliant career for many years. Internationally recognised as a jazz star, he has perforned and recorded with a galaxy of musical legends, many of them his close friends. Among those vividly recalled in this book are Bud Powell, Milt Jackson, Ray Charles, Anita O'Day, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Hampton Hawes, Al Haig, Philly Joe Jones, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Witherspoon, Dakota Staton, Red Rodney, John Hendricks, Tony Bennett and Marlene Dietrich. But while the story here centers on Peter King's life in jazz it shows other important sides of him too: his ambitions and achievements in classical composing, his interests outside music (he is a leading figure and writer in the aero-modelling world) and, above all, the treasured personal relationships rhat have sustained him through a turbulent life. "Flying High" tells of an exhilarating high altitude journey, in the jazz world and beyond.