Swinger! By Judy Carmichael

Stride pianist extraordinaire Judy Carmichael candidly admits to being a Pollyanna, a characteristic which, she knows, annoys many people. In this marvelous memoir, the California-bred jazz gal recalls several Pollyanna moments—such as jam sessions with costumed cartoon characters at one of her first piano gigs at Disneyland—but the book’s most powerful messages come in Judy’s courageous retelling of her many walks down the dark side of the street. For every sweet meeting with jazz greats such as Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, there are sour encounters with an abusive grandfather, an alcoholic father, and a neurotic mother. And later in the book, whole chapters describe in detail how a frightening cancer diagnosis in 2003 threatened her career, her self-image, and her very life. In fact, Judy shows good judgment as a writer by beginning the book with the Big C scare before flashing back to her troubled childhood and slow rise up the show-biz ladder before returning to health issues in later chapters. Along the way, readers are treated to Judy’s colorful recollections of gigs huge and humble, friends and boyfriends, faithful and far-fetched, and travels to increasingly exotic locations. Swinger is the story of a California surfer-girl, a German major in college who dreamed of a job in counterintelligence but instead became a beauty queen, an ac