Ghost Notes: The Life and Death of Kansas City Frank unearths one of jazz history’s most mysterious and overlooked figures—Frank Melrose, the gifted sideman who played in the shadows of legends like Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, and Bix Beiderbecke. While his brothers built music empires, Frank chased down smoke-filled stages, cut bootleg recordings, and lived out a raw, itinerant life that ended violently and anonymously in 1941.

Born into a family that shaped the early recording industry, Melrose rejected commerce for pure expression. Under the misleading pseudonym “Kansas City Frank,” he recorded some of the most haunting piano sides of the pre-war era—only to be forgotten by jazz history, excluded from the canon he helped shape. Through club ledgers, session notes, court transcripts, and bootleg acetates, this book reconstructs Melrose’s jagged path across Chicago, St. Louis, and the backroads of the Midwest, offering a brutally honest portrait of a man whose playing embodied absence, sorrow, and genius in equal measure.

This deeply researched biography resists the glossy myths that have sanitized jazz for mainstream consumption. Told in the voice of a veteran sideman who lived it all, Ghost Notes blends musical analysis with historical testimony, drawing out the human cost of erasure in American music. Frank Melrose’s story is not one of fame, but of survival, failure, and moments of transcendence too raw for the spotlight. This is jazz with the lights off, remembered the way it was lived—messy, unvarnished, and true.