Eric Nisenson was an American author and jazz historian. The son of inventor Jules Nisenson, he was born in New York City and raised in Rye, New York. He attended New York University, where he studied English, and then moved to San Francisco where he worked on the staffs of alternative publications including The Berkeley Barb and Heliotrope. Nisenson became a lifelong lover of jazz at the age of 15, when he listened to trumpeter Miles Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue. In the early 1970s, after he had moved back to New York, Nisenson was introduced to Davis. Although, as Nisenson recounts, he was "terrified" of Davis the first time he met him, the two men became friends, and Davis asked Nisenson to write his official biography. By the time Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis was published in 1982, however, the friendship had ended. In 1993 Nisenson published a biography of saxophonist John Coltrane entitled Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest, but by that time he had been diagnosed with a form of leukemia and was struggling with the disease and complications arising from it. 

February 12th, 1946 in New York City  /  Died:   Aug 15th, 2003