With a following of millions and a career spanning more than half a century, jazz legend Kenny Ball is still blowing hot and strong - to the tune of an amazing hundred-plus sell-out concerts a year.

Now Kenny lifts the lid on a lifetime of fun and foot-tapping rhythm in an exhilarating account of his adventures on the road. A story told with wit, warmth and the irrepressible humour that has kept Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen in the spotlight for over four decades.

Kenny charts his rise to fame from his humble beginnings as a Cockney kid in the East End of London, as one of nine children whose first taste of music was the regular Sunday family singsong led by their father on his piccolo! He was twelve when he produced his first blast - on a bugle, with the Sea Scouts. The trumpet was yet to come, a "demanding mistress" who would serve him for a lifetime.

After Kenny formed the jazzmen, he took them across the Channel to cellar clubs in Europe, where they lived out of a battered Dormobile, and were only able to afford seedy hostels to sleep in. His big break came when skiffle king Lonnie Donegan heard the Jazzmen auditioning for a TV show, and on the spot invited Kenny to join his own series. Their first record Teddy Bears' Picnic went down like a lead balloon. But with only their second record, Samantha, they rocketed into the charts overnight. The follow-up, Midnight In Moscow, went to number one and sold over a million copies.

Kenny Ball's story is a roller-coaster ride across continents, all the way to the United States, Australia and the Far East. Back home the band's regular haunts included the Cavern in Liverpool, where an unknown group calling themselves the Beatles were a support act to the Jazzmen...

WILLIAM HALL, biographer, broadcaster and show business writer, is a jazz enthusiast who has covered the music, film and entertainment scene throughout his long career in journalism.

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