L.A. After Midnight: The Life of Curtis Amy

Saxophone Noir, Soul Jazz Sessions, and the Lost Soundtrack of Black Los Angeles

De: Spang-a-Lang Publishing

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Curtis Amy played saxophone like a man scoring a city’s hidden life—never too loud, never too clean, but always true. L.A. After Midnight: The Life of Curtis Amy is a deep, unflinching biography of one of jazz’s most overlooked sidemen, whose career unfolded in the liminal corners of postwar Los Angeles. From Central Avenue’s twilight to Hollywood’s studio underbelly, Amy was everywhere—recording with Bobby Hutcherson, backing Gerald Wilson, ghosting on film scores, and shaping the noir-jazz sound that would later echo across vinyl crates and Spotify loops. He never made the cover. He never headlined. But his tone—gospel-soaked, minor-key, and quietly subversive—defined a generation of West Coast soul jazz and beyond.

Drawing from liner notes, tour schedules, oral histories, and uncredited soundtrack work, this book reconstructs Amy’s career as a lens on Black creative labor, racial marginalization in the studio system, and the politics of being musically “useful” but historically uncelebrated. It follows his collaborations with Merry Clayton, his ghost-playing gigs on Sunset Strip stages, and his presence in the margins of soundtracks now mythologized without him.

This is not a sanitized account—it’s a forensic testimony. Each chapter plays like a late-night set: looping, precise, raw with memory. L.A. After Midnight doesn't just chronicle a forgotten jazz musician. It scores what history left out.

Perfect for readers of Black music history, L.A. subculture, jazz biography, soundtrack collectors, and crate-digging archivists, this is Curtis Amy as you’ve never heard him—center-left of frame, exactly where he always played.