Tom Talbert, His Life and Times: Voices from a Vanished World of Jazz

Tom Talbert is a composer, arranger, bandleader, and pianist. In the late 1940s, he led his own big band in Los Angeles, featuring star artists like Art Pepper, Warne Marsh, and Claude Williamson. In New York in the 1950s, he wrote for Charlie Burnet, Buddy Rich, Claude Thornhill, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, and Machito, and he conceived and scored two of the most strikingly original albums, Wednesday's Child and Bix Duke Fats, in the history of jazz recording.
Tom Talbert returned to Los Angeles in 1975 and has continued to record his own innovative, impressionistic, and subtly swinging music using the finest players. In this account of his life and career, Bruce Talbot paints a vivid portrait of Tom Talbert and his world. Utilizing first-hand accounts, the book is crammed with memories of Los Angeles in the 1940s, road tours of the Midwest, a rare glimpse of the Twin Cities jazz scene during World War II, and a portrait of New York City in the 1950s when it was truly the jazz capital of the world. Tom Talbert - His Life and Times includes a complete discography of Tom Talbert's work and a CD containing fourteen of his most important and representative recordings.

Bruce Talbot was born in Wellington, New Zealand, where, as a young radio producer in the late 1950s he first heard and was moved by Tom Talbert's music. Moving to London, England in 1963 he worked for the BBC in radio, television and record production before being invited, in 1991, to come to the U.S. as Executive Producer of the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings record label.