George Melly

The larger-than-life singer George Melly was the most beloved and notorious exponent of Britain's postwar trad jazz renaissance. A respected memoirist, art critic, and bon vivant, his appetites for sex and alcohol were the stuff of legend, and his sobriquet "the Oscar Wilde of English jazz" was richly earned. Born Alan George Heywood Melly in Liverpool on August 17, 1926, he later documented his upbringing in the 1984 book Scouse Mouse, crediting his affection for the music hall to his mother, a socialite who rubbed shoulders with a circle of intimates including actor Michael ...