The larger-than-life singer George Melly was the most beloved and notorious exponent of Britain's postwar trad jazz renaissance. A respected memoirist, art critic, and bon vivant, his appetites for sex and alcohol were the stuff of legend, and his sobriquet "the Oscar Wilde of English jazz" was richly earned. Born Alan George Heywood Melly in Liverpool on August 17, 1926, he later documented his upbringing in the 1984 book Scouse Mouse, crediting his affection for the music hall to his mother, a socialite who rubbed shoulders with a circle of intimates including actor Michael Redgrave and dancer Frederick Ashton. While attending Stowe, Melly discovered both surrealism and jazz, the two forces most instrumental in shaping his singular perspective. In 1944, he joined the Royal Navy, engaging in a series of homosexual affairs that were later the subject of the 1977 memoir Rum, Bum and Concertina. After World War II Melly worked at the London Gallery, owned and operated by René Magritte's longtime friend and London Bulletin editor E.L.T. Mesens. He also engaged in a torrid affair with Mesens' wife, Sybil, prior to spending the winter of 1946 distributing anarchist literature on Senior Service ships deployed across the South Coast and the Mediterranean. On returning to civilian life in London Melly discovered the new vogue for the American jazz and blues traditions of the 1920s. Despite no musical training of his own, his gravelly voice, acid wit, and colorful zoot suits made him a natural for the stage, and in 1949 he joined Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band.