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| Author Claire Gordon : The Color of Music |
Nothing in her middle-class Los Angeles childhood suggested that Claire Gordon would form an abiding interest in jazz. But by the age of 14, the signs were there. She discovered the music of Duke Ellington and other jazz artists, all while in her teens!
The first major artist to enter her life was singer Maxine Sullivan, who became a life-long friend. Others followed - Nat "King" Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, pianists Art Tatum and Mary Lou Williams, disc jockeys, song writers, more artists, and other jazz buffs.
She was Duke Ellington's band secretary, married songwriter Irving Gordon ("Unforgettable"), and was a friend of Norman Granz - the list goes on. She has written about the people she knew with a light touch and a smile.
Claire remarried actor and television announcer Ken Williams after her marriage with Gordon ended.
On the advice of their business manager, they opened an antique shop. Claire became the buyer; she did the advertisements, and learned to put all the data in a computer in 1981.
Kenny died in 1984. Claire sold the company, and being lonely, joined a newly formed Duke Ellington Society, sure of finding like-minded friends here. She met Steven Lasker who came to her house for a visit.
“Can I see your Ellington stuff?” he asked.
Boxes full of papers and photos were on a high shelf in the closet. Tall Lasker lifted them down, pawed through the papers,
“You have a whole book here.”
What he referred to was Rex Stewart’s autobio which he had been writing and they had begun working on together just before his death.
“Why don’t you get it down?” Lasker asked, fingering the scribbled on yellow legal sized pads plus many little scraps of paper. “You know how to do word processing on the computer, don’t you?”
And that is how Claire began putting the pieces together of the book that became “Boy Meets Horn, the Autobiography of Rex Stewart.”
The British Allen Shipton had a company called Bayou Press had arranged to have the book printed by University of Michigan Press. He pressed her to do more autobiograpahies of local musicians.“Marshal Royal, Jazz Survivor” was next.
Shipton also had a role with a British company, which held the next output for more than a year, “My Unforgettable Jazz Friends.” This was Claire’s own memoir.
During a visit to New York in 2002, an editor from their local office visited and promised a contract within the month. It never came— the man left the company.
With the disappointment that the British company left, self-publishing had begun to be an option and Claire went ahead and decided to do it herself.
After that was printed, she wrote articles about early Los Angeles days (and left them in a drawer along with the other books and articles that had never been presented to anyone).
She finally began the book that had been tugging at her mind all those years – a book about twins. Studies of identical twins that had been separated lead to the knowledge of what traits are inborn and which are the result of the environment. Claire liked the idea of separating her twins.
The subject of twins always intrigued Claire because she was raised with another child her own age; creating a feeling of being a twin.
The Color of Music is the first novel by Claire Gordon.
Claire Gordon is the author of My Unforgettable Jazz Friends, Boy Meets Horn and Marshal Royal: Jazz Survivor
The Color Of Music is her first novel - a story of identical boy twins separated shortly after birth, their father is a famous African-American jazz musician and their mother, a blond European jazz fan. The mother of the biracial twins is unable to raise her babies and they become separated at an early age. One is raised as black and the other as white. How their musical heritage influences their lives is what makes the story a page-turning read.
