Revered by jazz singers the world over, Mark Murphy is barely known to the general public—which is curious, since he enjoyed a recording career that lasted more than half a century, made 48 albums in his lifetime, and played thousands of gigs with hundreds of musicians from Norway to Australia. A notoriously mercurial and secretive character, he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not merely frowned upon but illegal. He was a white man when many thought that jazz singers ought to be black. You could be white and a crooner, but Mark Murphy was never going to be a crooner, despite his extraordinary vocal skill. The plain fact is that he didn't fit in. He was eccentric, an out-of-time beatnik who spent years living in a camper van or sleeping on friends' sofas.

What Murphy had in spades was creativity and hipness: he understood what jazz was. He would tell audiences that you can divide your life into two halves: Before Jazz and After Jazz. "You had a life before jazz," he said, "but once you heard jazz, you knew that your life would never be the same again." As a youngster he admired