In the 1950s and 60s I read articles by the highly regarded jazz writer, Leonard Feather in Down Beat and Melody Maker. From his detailed knowledge of numerous New York musicians, I always assumed he was American, but in fact he was born in 1914 at No.93 Teignmouth Road, just off Walm Lane in Willesden. 
In his autobiography he said his father Nathaniel Feather owned a chain of clothing stores and he was brought up in a strictly conformist upper middle class Jewish family. When he was eleven the family moved to No.18 Bracknell Gardens Hampstead. While business was good, they had servants, and a Daimler car driven by a chauffeur.
Leonard studied classical piano and clarinet from an early age while secretly loving popular music. About the age of fifteen he came across Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘West End Blues’. He said: ‘I was hooked. Though I was not to realize it for many years, this episode in the listening room of the record shop, not long before I turned fifteen, would determine the pattern of my life. ‘West End Blues’ provided a sense of direction, an obsessive concern with every aspect of jazz, as nothing had before’.
However, it was hard to find American jazz records apart from Morris Levy’s shop in Whitechapel High Street, where Leonard would pay the high price of four shillings and three pence to buy an imported copy of Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’.
His secondary education was at St Paul’s Boys School in Barnes. For a brief period, he studied modern languages at University College and, before the family fortunes declined during the depression, he spent time in France and Germany, just less than a year before Hitler came to power.
While in Paris in 1932 he read in the Melody Maker that Louis Armstrong was going to appear at the London Palladium on his first European tour. ‘Indulging myself in a plane trip, my first, I arrived airsick enough to sit groggily through the opening night show. As the curtains parted, Louis, fronting a sloppy, makeshift band of European musicians, mostly non-American blacks, went through the ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ opener. This was a moment to carry me through a lifetime. A distant legend had become flesh and blood’. Incredibly, after the show, Leonard managed to meet Louis and his wife in local bar, and they were warm, open and welcoming. 
Leonard decided not to join the family business and from late 1932 to the summer of 1935 he worked as a poorly paid junior assistant at the British Lion film studios in Beaconsfield. He wrote letters to the Melody Maker, and in 1934 began writing articles for the magazine which continued into the 1980s. He resigned from British Lion, and in July 1935 Leonard and a friend travelled to New York where the American record critic and producer John Hammond, took them to visit the jazz clubs. The twelve-day trip socialising with the top musicians convinced Feather to make a career in jazz.
The following year he helped to bring sax player Benny Carter to London as arranger for Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra. Leonard was the producer and supervised the recordings. In January 1937 Carter played with a band of British musicians including trombonist George Chisholm who Feather promoted. Later, Leonard assembled groups of British musicians and made records through Harry Sarton the head of A&R at Decca. Feather also helped further the career of the highly talented English pianist George Shearing whom he had first met in 1938, and later when he moved to America.
When WWII broke out Feather travelled to America, this time to settle permanently, and he became the jazz critic of the Los Angeles Times. In 1943 his activities included public relations for the Duke Ellington orchestra, and record producing (including singer Dinah Washington’s first session).
He was a champion of modern jazz (especially black American jazz), and made records with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, and worked equally effectively with Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. He was closely associated with many others, including Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Erroll Garner, Ella Fitzgerald, Julie London and Miles Davis. He also composed songs, and his most famous ‘How Blue Can You Get’, was recorded by Louis Jordan and B.B. King.
Leonard wrote regularly for Down Beat from 1951 to 1986 and introduced the popular ‘blindfold’ tests for the magazine, where famous musicians gave their judgements of unnamed records, with often amusing results. He wrote numerous books and is best remembered for ‘The Encyclopaedia of Jazz’, which first appeared in 1955 and was revised and enlarged in the following years. Feather wrote for magazines in the USA, Britain, and Europe, and was for a long time the most widely read and most influential writer on jazz. In 1964 he received the only Grammy award ever given for jazz writing.
A setback in Feather’s life occurred in November 1949. He and his wife Jane were standing on a street corner in New York when they were hit by a driverless car which had rolled down a steep hill. They were taken to hospital but fortunately no bones were broken. In 1960 they moved to Los Angeles, and in 1987 much of his vast record collection was destroyed in the earthquake. Leonard died from complications of pneumonia in Encino, California, on 22 September 1994 and was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Lorraine, whose godmother was Billie Holiday.
Leonard was a remarkable man who lived the dream he had when he was a teenager and became a personal friend of leading jazz musicians.
You can hear ‘West End Blues’ by the Louis Armstrong Hot Five (1928) here.
His collection of photographs is held at the University of Idaho in the International Jazz Collection.
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