LESLIE KENTON is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and filmmaker who has written more than thirty books on health, beauty and spirituality, many of them bestsellers in the UK. She conceived the Origins product line for Estee Lauder, and was the first chairperson of The Natural Medicine Society in Great Britain. She lives in London and New Zealand.
"Stan Kenton's orchestra captured the world's imagination in the
late 1940s, just as other swing bands were fading. For the next
three decades, he would be the most popular bandleader who played
what was, essentially, art music. Unlike Count Basie's band,
Kenton's didn't play primarily for dancers. Unlike Woody Herman's,
it didn't have an entertaining, singing showman up front. Unlike
Duke Ellington's, it didn't have a repertoire of well-known,
original popular songs to bring in crowds. Yet Kenton was a master
of marketing: He packaged and sold the concepts of newness and
modernity to a pop-music audience.
At first his experiments ran parallel to the beboppers, who were
likewise introducing a more sophisticated harmonic system into
jazz. Along with Dizzy Gillespie, Kenton introduced Afro-Cuban
polyrhythms to North America. And where Ellington famously
disdained categories, Kenton reveled in creating terms like
"artistry in rhythm" and "progressive jazz." His music was at once
futuristic, masculine and highly romantic, and his fanatical
followers were the jazz equivalent of Trekkies.Onstage, though,
Kenton seemed far from a wild-eyed avant-gardist; his manner was
buttoned down and conservative. He never appeared in less than a
suit and tie and conducted himself like a combination of college
professor and church leader...Certainly bebop legend Art Pepper--a
star of several Kenton orchestras who wrote a powerful memoir of
his years as a junkie--perceived a world of difference between
himself and his employer.Yet "Love Affair"--a harrowing and
intimate memoir by Kenton's daughter, Leslie--now reveals that he
and Pepper were more alike than anyone realized. Mr. Sparke
mentions that Kenton abused alcohol in later life; Ms. Kenton
depicts her father as a lifelong alcoholic and such a troubled soul
that you wonder at times how he could hold himself together well
enough to keep his band going. Most shockingly, Ms. Kenton asserts
that their own relationship was, for a time, incestuous.Ms.
Kenton's book is a fall-and-rise "recovery" memoir in the tradition
of Lillian Roth's "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (1954). She worshipped her
father in spite of his apparent shortcomings, and they bonded over
a shared love of art and music. The tone she takes toward her
father is one of forgiveness rather than accusation, and often the
book reads like the tale of a taboo liaison (it's worth noting that
she titled it "Love Affair," not "Daddy Dearest"). But keep in mind
she was only 11 when, she says, he first forced himself on her, and
only 13 when they broke the physical "affair" off.Ms Kenton
maintains that she and her father never stopped caring about each
other, and she even seems to shield him from blame, claiming he
suffered from dissociative identity disorder and portraying him as
dominated by his controlling mother. Because Kenton had divorced
Leslie's mother, her grandmother played an outsize role in her life
as well. At one point, Ms. Kenton charges, her grandmother sent her
off to a sanitarium without reason. On another occasion, she pushed
her 10-year-old granddaughter to play "dress up" with a pair of
creepy cross-dressers backstage at a theater in New York. Fans of
the bandleader, who have long been known for being insular and
cultish, will be scandalized by the suggestion that his family life
could be so sordid. In particular, they'll be horrified by the idea
of Kenton as a victim rather than the one in control. Yet such
revelations won't change the quality of the man's music, and in
some ways Ms. Kenton's account is the most sympathetic and human
portrait of the bandleader yet to be published."--"Wall Street
Journal "
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