Bill Moody

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Bill Moody (born September 27, 1941 in Webb City , Missouri , † January 14, 2018 ) was an American crime writer , jazz writer and drummer .

life and work

Bill Moody grew up in Santa Monica and after four years in the United States Air Force studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston . He began his career as a professional drummer in a southern California surf band , but this soon became too boring for him and he began as a jazz musician in a trio with pianist Junior Mance and singer Jimmy Rushing .

At the invitation of Czechoslovak students from Berklee he played representatively in 1967 with the Big Band of Gustav Brom at performances during the Jazz Festival Prague . After the originally planned two weeks, he got stuck in Brno . During the next year he was the only American who was allowed to tour the Soviet Union and the GDR with the band . The invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague and the end of the Prague Spring surprised him during a short stay in London and it was several months before he came back to his apartment in Brno and got his drums back. He stayed in Europe for another two years, where he a. a. played with Maynard Ferguson , Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks and participated in a theater production with Peter Herbolzheimer in Hamburg . After he had played with the orchestra of the singer Lou Rawls on his European tour, he hired him as a permanent member and he returned to the United States in Los Angeles , where he also performed with Earl Hines . From the mid-1970s he played with Lou Rawls in the large hotels of Las Vegas as well as in Japan and Australia . The singer would later serve as a model for the character of Lonnie Cole in his first novel Solo Hand - a jazz singer who, at the instigation of his record company, is transformed into a pop star and all-round entertainer .

In addition to his engagements, Moody studied literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , where he would later teach. He began to write as a music critic for JazzTimes , but also wrote his first short stories (e.g. for Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine). For eight years he was a jazz DJ at the university's own radio station KUNV-FM .

He processed experiences from his stay in Europe into a book about the expatriates among the American jazz musicians. The book The Jazz Exiles. American Musicians Abroad is based on interviews with Art Farmer , Mark Murphy , Jon Hendricks, Bud Freeman , Bob Dorough and others. a. Bill Moody, however, was in 1994 (for his detective novels from the jazz milieu, which also experiences from Europe known Looking for Chet Baker , dt. Looking for Chet Baker ) were incorporated and Las Vegas ( Death of a Tenor Man, dt. Moulin Rouge, Las Vegas about the murder of Wardell Gray ). His protagonist is the pianist Evan Horne, who is forced to become a private detective after his right hand was smashed in an accident. The pianist Bill Evans served him as a model . In his novels he often mixed real characters and events with fictitious events. In Bird Lives he tracks down a serial killer who murders smooth jazz musicians, leaving behind a chain of clues from jazz history. In Shades of Blue , it revolves around the Birth of the Cool sessions of Miles Davis and the extent to which he made this "bond" with other musicians. He also described the milieu of Monte Rio , where Moody lived for a long time. In The Sound of the Trumpet is about lost photographs of Clifford Brown .

Moody lived near San Francisco. He taught creative writing at Sonoma State University in California, but was also active as a jazz musician in the San Francisco Bay Area with the Terry Henry Trio and Dick Cole .

Publications

Non-fiction

  • The Jazz Exiles. American Musicians Abroad University of Nevada Press, 1993

Detective novels

  • Solo Hand , 1994
    • Solo Hand , German by Anke Caroline Burger; Unionsverlag, Zurich 2001. ISBN 3-293-20198-9
  • Death of a Tenor Man , 1995
    • Moulin Rouge, Las Vegas , German by Anke Caroline Burger; Unionsverlag, Zurich 2002. ISBN 3-293-20231-4
  • The Sound of the Trumpet , 1997
  • Bird Lives! , 1999
    • Bird Lives! , German by Anke Caroline Burger; Unionsverlag, Zurich 2006. ISBN 3-293-00356-7
  • Looking for Chet Baker , 2002
    • Looking for Chet Baker , German by Anke Caroline Burger; Unionsverlag, Zurich 2004. ISBN 3-293-00330-3
    • as an audio book: In Search of Chet Baker , read by Karl-Heinz Tafel; Delta Music, Frechen 2006. ISBN 3-86538-209-6
  • Shades of Blue , 2008
  • Fade to Blue , 2011
  • Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz , 2012

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Announcement of death on Bill Moody's website
  2. ↑ E.g. published in Randisi (editor): Murder and all that Jazz , Signet Books, 2004
  3. ↑ According to him, Red Mitchell, with whom he played in Sweden, told him about the recording sessions, and the music on the album was one of Moody's personal favorites.
personal data
SURNAME Moody, Bill
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz drummer and crime writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Webb City , Missouri
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 2018