When he died in 1975, Sandy Brown was working on an autobiography in which he had set out to describe, with the incisiveness and idiosyncratic wit which was already familiar to Listener readers of his columns on jazz and pop, the evolution of his talents against a background of Indian childhood, Edinburgh schooldays, and the rewards and frustrations of his twin careers of jazz musician and acoustic architect. Incomplete as it is, the section here provides from the inside a remarkable account of the unique combination of temperament and ability, at once composer and executant, which makes a jazz musician. It is also often extremely funny.

The portrait of an outstanding artist and extraordinary man is completed here by a selection from Sandy Brown’s Listener articles and the correspondence with which he enlivened the in-trays of public figures, colleagues and friends.

2009 will see the eightieth anniversary of Sandy Brown’s birth, the Faber Finds reissue of this title is timed to celebrate that.