Neil Ardley: Kaleidoscopes and Rainbows,
Vivien Ardley, Jazz in Britain Books, £19.99

VIVIEN ARDLEY’s biography of her protean writer-musician husband, Neil, is just about as full as any biography could be.

Sometimes you feel you are delving through a personal archive of this grammar-school boy from Wallington, Surrey, so detailed is this life-story and so full of documentation and illustrations from his books, family photographs, press packs and reviews of his records, letters, transcripts of radio broadcasts, discographies, blurbs and lists and reproduced pages from his copious books — here is the virtual entirety of an author/musician, fully setting down the features and details of a multifaceted life.

I know Ardley mostly as a brilliant orchestrator, jazz composer and arranger, an English “pastoral” artist closest in his musical inventiveness to the great Gil Evans, orchestral partner of Miles Davis.