Desperado - An Autobiography - Tomasz Stańko
Series Editor's Preface
Desperado - An Autobiography - Tomasz Stańko
Alyn Shipton [+]
Royal Academy of Music, London
Alyn Shipton has co-authored many musicians’ biographies, including most recently, that of chart topping jazz bandleader Chris Barber. His life of singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson won the 2014 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for pop biography.
Description
Tomasz Stańko (1942–2018) was one of the major jazz trumpeters in the second half of the twentieth century, through into the first two decades of the twenty-first. This autobiography is not a conventional ‘as told to’ book, but a dynamic and evolving series of conversations with the journalist and music critic Rafał Księżyk between July 2008 and May 2009. Consequently, although it takes a roughly chronological route through Stańko’s life and career, it strays into many of the highways and byways of a real conversation. From it, we learn more about Stańko’s life and conditions and the background to his career than we might from a more conventional text.