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(Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob
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About (Low)life: A Memoir Of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, And The
Product Description “With deadpan humor, whip-smart insights and some damn fine sentences, Charles Farrell has written a classic chronicle of life in the twilight world, on par with masters of the genre like Damon Runyon, Mezz Mezzrow, Nat Hentoff and Nick Pileggi. A truly great read.”―Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, and author of Madam: The Life of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz-AgeA world-class jazz pianist, Charles Farrell made his living working Mob clubs from the time he was a teenager in the 1960s. He later moved from music to the complex world of professional boxing, managing dozens of fighters, including former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks and former gang leader Mitch “Blood” Green, who famously went toe-to-toe with Mike Tyson―once in the ring and once in the street.A fight-fixer and gangster, Farrell ran afoul of New York mobsters in the 1990s and retreated to the mountains of Puerto Rico, coming home only after an infamous boxing legend brokered his safe return.Retired from the fight game, he returned to jazz and, among other collaborators, played frequently with his friend Ornette Coleman, the godfather of “Free Jazz” and one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.(Low)life is a singular book by a singular man. Review "With deadpan humor, whip-smart insights and some damn fine sentences, Charles Farrell has written a classic chronicle of life in the twilight world, on par with masters of the genre like Damon Runyon, Mezz Mezzrow, Nat Hentoff and Nick Pileggi. A truly great read."--Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, and author of Madam: The Life of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz-Age To scrape the heavens with your art, to plunge into the sordors of the world with your business: not even Charles Farrell can explain Charles Farrell. But he's better qualified to try it than anybody else, and you owe it to yourself - I might even say it's your duty as an American - to experience (Low)life. Elegant, unexpected, seeking always the real behind the real, Farrell's prose hits like the precision fists of... blows like the wild trumpet of... I give up. --James Parker, The Atlantic "This is a book people will be reading in years to come--like Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land or Art Pepper's Straight Life or Jack Black's You Can't Win. I've devoured books about life on the margins since I was a kid, and I've read about as many of them as a human can get to, and I've never encountered a writer who knew that world as well as Charles Farrell and could match him for clear-eyed, unsentimental, shrewdly observed prose." --Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time and The World Is Always Coming to an End (Low)life is a protean, impossible, brilliant memoir by an exquisitely unique observer. Charles Farrell's stories are fascinating, but it's his failures, his missed opportunities and blown bets that truly transcend into magical, enthralling, and uplifting territory (and where his writing shines the brightest.) For while Farrell has been so many things--professional pianist, fight-fixer, gangster--he has arrived here, later in life, as an emotional and deeply insightful writer, and his book is a gift of observation, a Henry Miller-esque odyssey through the murky bottom of Americana. --Sam Sheridan, author of The Fighter's Mind, A Fighter's Heart, and The Disaster Diaries, and creator of the TV series I Am The Night Every great boxing writer must understand boxing as a sport. But only those who have been artists can understand it as art, and only those who have been hustlers can understand it as a hustle. No one can interpret boxing like Charles Farrell, because no one has lived the life he has. This memoir shows why he is the best boxing writer in America. --Hamilton Nolan, boxing writer for Deadspin and HBO, editorial writer for the New York T
