Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union - Softcover

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 atR