Jazz Fiction: Take Two

By David Rife and James Langdon

Jazz Fiction: Take Two is the sequel to Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2008). The earlier work filled a pressing need in jazz studies by identifying and discussing 700 works of fiction with a jazz component. Take Two surveys over 500 newer works of jazz-inflected fiction that have appeared from the turn of the 21st century to the present. The essay-reviews at the heart of the book give readers a sense of the plot of each surveyed work and characterizes its debt to jazz. The entries are written with both general readers and scholars in mind and are intended to entertain as well as inform. This alone qualifies Jazz Fiction: Take Two as an original and useful resource.

Sascha Feinstein, Founding Editor of Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature and several books on jazz, says of Jazz Fiction: Take Two: “With this companion volume to Jazz Fiction, David Rife enhances his position as an indispensable scholar of jazz-related fiction. The copious entries—each written not only with deft concision but irresistible linguistic flair—provide the kind of insight that only someone profoundly well-read in the genre could cultivate. One could not ask for a more delightful guide.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387415854

Book preview

Dedication

In honor of the grandfathers we wish we had known:  Chief Anse (d. 1855) and Charles Langdon (1886-1969).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction to Select Categories

Rites of Passage/Coming-of-Age

Works with Historical Figures

Blues at the Crossroads

Crime-Mystery-Thriller

High Spirits-Dark Laughter-Absurdity

Gynocentric

Old Folks at Home and on the Road

Works Under Review

Reader Resources and Indices

Jazz Fiction Short Lists

Shorter Works

Novels

Anthologies:  Comprehensive

Anthologies:  Focused

The Black Experience

Blues and Ragtime

Coming-of-Age/Rites of Passage

Crime-Mystery-Thriller

Historical

International

Les Gals

Old Folks

Science Fiction-Fantasy-Horror

Series

Story Collections

Through the Cracks

Websites

Jazz Players and Friends Reference Index

Title Index

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

For help and encouragement in the preparation of the manuscript of this book, I’d like to offer warm thanks to my Editorial Board whose careful attention to the syntax of things rescued me, a hundred times over, from embarrassing myself—further.  I hope the anal-retentive task they were subjected to didn’t interfere with their love lives.  They are, alphabetically, John Donovan, Roger Goodman, Brad Nason, Gabriela Rife, Tom Simek, and Patricia Siskin.

Three others not only did time in the arid province of proofreading but lent me their expertise in areas far beyond my competence.  For ideas and guidance concerning the organization, design, and production of the book, hearty and heartfelt thanks to Sascha Feinstein, Gary Hafer, and Sandy Rife.

The person who presided over all of the above—the Managing Editor of Take Two—is Jim Langdon.  I stand in awe of his executive and linguistic skills and his supportive demeanor.  Thanks, Cuzzin Jimmy: There would be no book without you.

Finally, it was love at first sight when I saw Gregory Sipp’s mosaic, Charlie Parker.  I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate composition to adorn the cover of a work about jazz.  It’s eye-catching—jazzy—and I’m proud to have it introduce Jazz Fiction:  Take Two.  Many thanks to Gregory Sipp for his generosity in allowing me to borrow his spectacular work of art.

Foreword

After nearly 15 years of researching, tracking down, and writing, I finally published my book on jazz fiction (Jazz Fiction:  A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide, Scarecrow 2008).  I was confident I had scraped the bottom of the barrel and exhausted my interest in the subject.  Surely no other writers were planning to use the music to embellish let alone energize their works.  But before I could catch my breath, I started to stumble on a title here and a promotion there that implied or proclaimed that the work in question did indeed contain some dimension of the music that had been chasing me far longer than most jazz artists live—and, addicted, I jumped back in where I had left off.

Like the music itself, jazz fiction had not died, nor had my interest in it been exhausted.  I started taking notes and teamed up with Dr. Google among others to do light research.  I was shocked by the quantity of works I uncovered; I was equally shocked by the number of works I had missed in my previous study.  Light research became heavy research, and several years later the fruit of my labors materialized:  Jazz Fiction:  Take Two (Take Two henceafter).

The first book contained approximately 700 works by 525 authors and covered the first 90 or so years of the music’s colorful history starting around 1910.  This one contains nearly 500 works by 375 writers and focuses on works that have been published from around 2000 till 2022, with occasional dips into the past and one into the near future.  The latter is Laura Warrell’s Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2022.  Early reviews of the novel featuring a jazz musician—and the music he lives to play—are enthusiastic and suggest it may achieve the status of a major work.  Perhaps we’re in for another renaissance of jazz and the literature it inspires.

My two works are different in subtle but significant ways.  The first one included an historical overview and called its entries annotations.  This book contains no such historical overview, and the items at its center might better be called summaries or essays even.  They are generally longer and more relaxed than annotations.  They are also simultaneously more opinionated and critical (in the literary sense) than the earlier book, which worked hard to create the illusion of objectivity.  By hints, winks, and occasionally direct statements, I try to let the reader know what I think of a work’s quality.  The earlier work assiduously avoided revealing anything concerning the denouement of a given plot.  You’ll find no spoiler alerts here.  Any readers who can remember the plot mechanics of a work they find revealed in one of the following entries is unusual indeed.  From intimate experience, I know that the elapsed time between the moment one encounters a promising title and puts their hands on the work itself is typically several weeks.  By then, everything gleaned from the reviews, ads, and promotional materials that had led to the item in the first place have been forgotten.

Like the earlier book, this one contains a long section comprising seven arbitrarily selected categories.  These were chosen (as were the categories contained in Jazz Fiction) according to works containing themes and subjects of broad interest.  How I would like to have included sections titled The Effect of Hurricane Katrina on Jazz Fiction, The Zen Buddhism Motif in Contemporary Jazz Fiction, and a dozen others.  The works discussed below contain ample material for a dozen such essays and a couple of dissertations beside.  But finally, due largely to considerations of space and time, I limited myself to such universally interesting divisions as Women, Growing Up, and Historical Figures.  Please note that the stories I discuss within categories, like the categories themselves, were chosen pretty much at random.  They are designed to provide readers with a sense of the range of works shaped by a particular subject or theme.  Please know, too, that the length of a given entry is irrelevant to its quality.

I have provided, toward the end of the book, two lists that serious readers will find invaluable.  The first is a comprehensive list of the musicians (and a few of their friends and sponsors) who are referenced in the works.  So, if you wish to find out how your favorites are characterized by authors of jazz fiction, all you have to do is consult this list—Character References by Summary—and you’ll discover how they are depicted in Story A, B, and C.  This of course will lead you to the summary, which in turn may motivate you to acquire the work.  Or not.  The second list alphabetizes all of the works contained in the summaries—Alpha by Title—allowing you to track down a work whose author you have forgotten.  If you remember the name of the writer, of course, proceed immediately to the summaries, which are alphabetized by author.

Introduction to Select Categories

Many readers, I hope, will be inspired by specific entries in Take Two to seek out other works with similar themes or subjects.  Suppose you read the summary of Joseph Burnett’s Old Folks at Home and wonder what other writers have had to say about elderly jazz musicians.  All you have to do is locate the category that fits your interest to see what else is available.  Then, when a title catches your eye, you can get an idea of what it’s like by returning to the summary section, the central burden of the book.  After reading what’s there, you will know whether you want (or, in some cases, need) to locate a copy of the work.  That’s when the fun begins:  Some entries have entered the Witness Protection Program and others have just gone into hiding.  On the other hand, the majority of longer works are readily available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other book dealers.  And never forget that libraries typically offer interlibrary loan service.  Incidentally, the categories I offer here were arbitrarily selected.  In rereading my manuscript recently, I thought at one point that I could offer such categories as Hurricane Katrina and Jazz, Jazz as Therapy, and Zen Jazz Fiction.  But I concluded that the broader the category, the more useful for most readers.  I hope I was right.

Rites of Passage/Coming-of-Age

One of the most familiar themes in art, including jazz-inflected fiction, is the rite of passage narrative that typically traces the growth of a character to a higher level of enlightenment.  The most familiar manifestation of this theme is the coming-of-age story, a term often used synonymously with rite of passage and involving a young character overcoming a series of challenges to achieve a higher level of maturity.  The names of Huck Finn, Jo March, Holden Caulfield, Scout Finch, and David Copperfield come to mind. 

One of my personal favorites is Madeleine Altimari, a delightfully incorrigible nine-year-old in Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas.  Maddy has recently lost her showgirl mother and been ostracized by her more conventional classmates on the same day she’s been thrown out of school.  She’s determined to sing jazz on this night (Christmas Eve) before an audience or bust.  Maddy has set her sights on The Cat’s Pajamas, a club way on the other side of Philadelphia.  Undeterred by the prospect of an arduous journey, Maddy trudges for hours down alleys, across backyards, and up slushy streets till, at 2 a.m., she reaches her destination.  She’s received (almost) like royalty.  The musicians make room for her in the spotlight and drop their jaws when she both imitates and honors her idol Blossom Dearie.  Her life, at nine, seems complete.

Mick Carlon’s Danny Bolden is also nine when Riding on Duke’s Train begins, starting him on a journey toward selfhood.  Like Maddy, Danny lacks adult guidance:  His parents died when he was still a baby and he has just buried his grandmother on the grounds of their rural south Georgia home.  Not knowing where to go or what to do, Danny hops on the first train he sees, expecting to be kicked off as soon as he’s discovered.  But, miraculously, this train happens to be the privately owned conveyance of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra.  (Some readers will remember that Ellington was forced to buy his own train to escape the segregation of public transport.)  So instead of bungling his way to a precarious future, as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas had done, Danny finds himself in the bosom of a large, loving family, with the Duke himself assuming the role of surrogate father and his musicians becoming his uncles, cousins, and motherly aunt.  The destitute, illiterate Black boy learns and grows under their watchful eyes and tutelage and is well on his way to responsible adulthood when the group dissolves.

In Mark Ruffin’s The Sidewinder, the protagonist takes a different route to maturity.  Shawn’s moral growth is enabled by his sensitivity to racial and religious issues.  Shawn gains insight into these matters through discussions with his family and his love of sports and music.  As a Jew, he has experienced anti-Semitism and become painfully aware of his outsider status, and this encourages him to celebrate the breakthroughs of other outsiders.  He exults when his beloved Phillies add a Black to their roster, and he celebrates every touchdown that Jimmy Brown scores.  One day while walking through a Black neighborhood, he is captivated by the music he hears, so he stops to listen.  He later learns that it’s Lee Morgan and his combo who are rehearsing what was to become a bebop standard, The Sidewinder. Immersed in the music, Shawn is unaware that a group of hostile young Blacks have surrounded him and are on the verge of attack when another young Black intervenes, allowing Shawn to hasten to his bus.  It was a moment, and a gesture, that Shawn would never forget.  Sixteen years later, after he’s become a family man, Shawn bumps into Willie (now Bill) downtown and the two greet each other like long-lost brothers.  Bill has become a relatively successful businessman and has prime season tickets to Phillies games.  Shawn is elated when Bill asks him to join him at a game.  One of the warmest coming-of-age scenes in jazz fiction occurs when Bill escorts Shawn to his box at the stadium and introduces Shawn as his best friend. 

In Anna Hecker’s When the Beat Drops, 17-year-old Mira Alden is also an outsider.  She’s a jazz freak and musical prodigy in a rock-and-roll society.  She prefers to practice her trumpet and compose neo-bop music in her head rather than hang out with her peers.  And no matter what she does or where she goes, she’s always accompanied by the spirit of Miles Davis.  But Mira has graduated high school and has a summer before her to refine her musical skills.  She hopes to qualify for admission to a renowned Harlem conservatory in the fall.  But Mira is 17 and thus vulnerable to the various traps and attractions that lie in wait for the young person with time on her hands.  Although she dislikes electronic music, Mira allows herself to be persuaded to go to a rave with a friend.  Once there, she’s further persuaded to help with DJing.  She’s amazed not only that she enjoys the scene but that she has a gift for managing sound equipment.  She’s also surprised to find that she socializes pretty well—well enough (predictably) to enter into her first romantic relationship and (also predictably) relinquish her virginity.  Yes, it’s not long before she discovers that her older lover (he’s 21 to her 17) had misrepresented himself.  Mira is now ready to rue her loss of innocence and recommit herself to her first love:  jazz.

Seth Pevey’s 13-year-old Andre in Uptown Blues is also a musical (and intellectual) prodigy who doesn’t go anywhere without his trumpet or the spirit of his musical hero, Louis Armstrong.  In fact, Andre is so absorbed in his musical hero that he seems actually to become Armstrong at times.  The two trumpeters have a natural affinity:  both came from the same New Orleans neighborhood, had father issues, became waifs, and turned to music for solace.  Andre has acquired an apparently self-induced impediment:  He has become a selective mute; that is, his silence is deliberate, not physiological.  This probably occurred when Andre saw his father shot dead on a streetcar.  Because Andre was the only witness, he has to go in hiding among the swamps of Louisiana, with the bad guy in pursuit.  Amid a chain of violent events, Andre is found and looked after by two private detectives who not only protect  him but enable him to overcome his traumatic handicap.  The last anyone heard, teenage Andre was performing at Carnegie Hall—with the spirit of Pops Armstrong in front row, one hopes. 

Devashish’s young protagonist in Jazz Master is also in love with jazz and aspires to become a jazz musician.  Of course, Dan Hennessy has to leave his banal home in the suburbs to find out where the action is.  Fortunately, he couldn’t be in a better time or place.  It’s the mid-50s and San Francisco is close by.  Before long, he’s basking in the buzz created by such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts.  More important for his spiritual and musical education is his meeting with Elijah, a legendary saxophonist-music teacher who used to be a monk.  Elijah takes Dan under wing and tutors him in the intricacies of jazz saxophone, especially as they facilitate the principles of Zen Buddhism.  For Dan to reach a higher, more sophisticated level of mastery, in other words, he must undergo a spiritual indoctrination parallel to his musical training.  This rigorous quest is supported by romance.  Dan falls in love with a poet, and they never tire of discussing art as they lovingly explore each other’s bodies.  Somehow, spiritualism, art, creativity, and eroticism are bound together in the individual’s search for enlightenment.  It’s a combination that’s skillfully dramatized in this short novel.

Readers with a special interest in the coming-of-age theme in jazz fiction will be gratified to learn of the existence of two collections of short stories that explore various aspects of the subject.  Both Wesley Brown’s Dance of the Infidels and Arya F. Jenkins’ Blue Songs in an Open Key focus on young characters trying to make sense of the world.  These characters are Black, brown, and white; hetero-, homo-and bi-sexual; and they are united by their common goal:  the discovery of who they are and how they fit into the complicated mechanics of their worlds.  More often than not, their quests are facilitated by jazz.

Brown’s Between a Shadow and a Smile presents an affecting portrait of a teenage Dexter Gordon, newly arrived in Harlem from his home in California.  After he recovers from the bus-lag he suffered in his cross-country journey, he is absolutely floored by the music he encounters and terrified by the realization that he will soon be called upon to perform.  We don’t have to ask how that turns out.  Another story in the collection, Danny’s Hideaway, portrays a kid who’s seriously confused by religion—until he hears the Count Basie band playing on the radio.  The music seems to clarify the issue in Danny’s mind, as he starts to believe that God is speaking to him through Basie’s jazz.  Young Wardell, in Zu Zay, Zu Zay, is equally confused by life and as smitten by jazz as Danny.  Wardell’s confusion concerns the conflict between the straight life of his hard-working father and the jive world of his musical idol Cab Calloway.  Compounding his confusion, Danny wonders why his Harlem neighbors would riot over the rumored beating of a young Black man by a white cop for stealing a trivial item from the dime store.

Dance of the Infidels flirts with the novel-in-stories form, with Anna Danova as protagonist.  When Anna first appears, in In the Land of Oop-Pop-a-Da, she’s a high school sophomore in 1939 New York.  She’s the daughter of Russian immigrants and seems well on her way to becoming a typical American teenager.  She has no interest in music until, one day, her sound-engineer dad drags her to a jazz concert on Randall’s Island.  One glimpse of Duke Ellington as he introduces the program takes Anna’s breath away.  She’s besotted by jazz before hearing a single note.  In these days leading up to WW 2, she soon finds her way to the Harlem dance clubs, like the Savoy, and socializing, unselfconsciously, with Blacks of both sexes.  She surprises herself to find she has a talent for rug-cutting:  She dances up a storm and enjoys every minute of it.  She’s even privileged to meet several jazz luminaries, like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billy Eckstine.  But she’s most impressed by Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.  They show Anna that full-bodied women can carry themselves with class and pizzazz.  The war comes and goes, the jazz scene in Harlem subsides, Anna and her friends become adults and lose contact with each other, and the whole world is cloaked in post-war depression.  We last see Anna in In the Mood to Be Moody.  She has become a seamstress, like her mother before her, and goes to the movies to escape her sense of isolation for a couple hours.  One day, as she is taking stock of the losses in her life, she is rescued, in a sense, when she sees King Pleasure and Blossom Dearie perform their classic Moody’s Mood for Love, a song whose lyrics nudge her toward realistic self-discovery.

Most of the 17 stories in Arya F. Jenkins’s Blues in an Open Key revolve around young people who are assisted by bebop on their bumpy road to self-discovery.  The stories are filled with references to booze and drugs, racial issues, Buddhism, and homosexuality, and they often do so in language that attempts to imitate the patterns of jazz.  The author confesses a deep affection for the music and characterizes hard bop as an experiment, a leaning over the edge of time with sound. There are more females than males in these stories, and they often suffer father issues.  The characters of both sexes typically turn to jazz as therapy and escape.

Take, for example, the teenage speaker in Lulu and Me.  She wants to write poetry and so runs away from home and goes to Provincetown where she hopes to find a proper garret to compose in.  She misses her jazz-loving dad and thinks of him often.  Whenever she feels especially lonely or confused, she connects with him by listening to such great boppers as Bird, Dizzy, Trane, and Miles—the musicians who expressed for him (and through him, her) the blues of isolated, solitary people.  The speaker of course fails to realize that her dream of writing timeless poetry in a cozy garret with jazz playing in the background is a romantic fantasy.  Instead, she is forced to find work:  in a fish factory, in Provincetown, in winter!  But she also finds a sweetheart:  a bi-sexual jazz singer who loves to party.  It doesn’t take much effort for the older, more experienced Lulu to convince the speaker to accompany her to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  They take the town by storm (in their minds), kick ass for a few days, and return to the frigid reality of Massachusetts.  Shortly after, Lulu disappears, leaving the protagonist to face the cheerless banality of her life.  Ah, youth!

The lead character in Epistrophy is older, better educated, and more privileged than the gal in Lulu, but her problems run even deeper, much deeper than hers.  Frances has been addicted to alcohol for many years already, and she’s now at Cornell participating in an ashram and teaching English.  She’s desperately hoping to put her past life behind her and experience the enlightenment Buddhism—the jazz of religion—has to offer.  Jazz helps, too.  She interprets what she listens to and uses the music as if it were religion itself, praying it will lead her to the lessons both teach, that all phenomena is emptiness.  Late in the story we learn the particulars of Frances’s tragic past: When she was still an infant, she was sexually abused by her mother.  When, years later, she works up the courage to tell her father, he callously rejects her—one more instance of the victim being victimized.

Soliloquy also starts in Ithaca, New York (Cornell, presumably) and presents a protagonist who is an alcoholic, bastard son of a Buddhist monk.  At school, he becomes chums with a young woman, Abbie, a jazz-loving, alcoholic lesbian.  One day, she persuades Myles to join AA and dry out with her.  She also wants to introduce him to jazz and persuades him to take a $400 taxi ride to Manhattan to see McCoy Tyner at Birdland.  They are both transfixed by the music, and he feels change is in the air.  The music has, strangely, made him feel closer to Abbie and yet farther away.  After all, she has her sweetheart waiting for her back on campus, while he has the consolations of literature, jazz, aloneness, and snow. 

In Foolish Love, Sheila’s background and situation are far different from the previous characters’.  For one thing, she’s married to a man 20 years her elder and both of them are unemployed and, because of their addiction to booze, unemployable.  They spend their days and nights sloshed.  Except for one major difference, they fit the definition of trailer trash.  Most readers would sense a disastrous end for Sheila, but as soon as we see her listening to jazz, we know there is hope for her redemption.  She listens to music with full attention, and believes Billie Holiday is speaking to her when she expresses the sorrow of her own life.  Just as Sheila seems suicidal, she remembers Holiday’s words and interprets them to mean she must find a way to sing her way out of her degrading situation.  Her first, heroic step toward singing her way out of despair is to seek psychological guidance—another compelling example of the redemptive potential of music.

Like her metaphorical sisters in Blue Songs in an Open Key, Chantal (Chan) comes from a broken family and develops a deep love for bebop and, especially, Billie Holiday.  But unlike the others, Chan is Black and refuged with her loving grandmother in an apartment overlooking the threatening streets of Harlem.  By the age of five, she exhibited a gift for music, mastering the entire Motown songbook before entering school.  By the time she reaches her teens, she’d had enough of the educational regimen and so hits the streets, whoring, boozing, and drugging, till one day she realizes she needs help.  She’s lucky to find sympathetic therapists, who believe Chan’s sincerity when she says she identifies so thoroughly with Billie Holiday that she patterns her own behavior after her idol’s in order to get closer to the music she had made.  A therapist arranges—like a fairy godmother—for Chan to enter a posh (white, privileged) rehab center where she succeeds in drying out.  When she’s released, she is confident she’s regained her chops and will before long begin to sing in public, Small’s she hopes.  The story’s resonant title comes from a comment attributed to Billie Holiday—an artist who likely never set foot in a posh establishment of any kind.

Works with Historical Figures

Too bad we don’t have a convenient catchphrase to describe those jazz-inflected works of fiction that contain historical characters and events, like formal biographies, for instance.  How nice it would be to have a terse, ready-made, self-explanatory term like docudrama, biopic, rom-com, or dramedy close to hand.  Faction has been used to denote those stories based (to what degree, no one will ever know) on real-life people and events.  In one bibulous moment, I thought jazzfaction might be the answer but then quickly decided it was too ugly for words—or a made-up word, at least.  So, we’re back where we started, with headings like Jazz Fiction Based on Historical Characters and Events.  For good or ill, there aren’t many of these worth discussing.  In most cases it makes sense to Listen to the music, man.

For nearly the 100 years leading up to, say, 2020, there were few full- or even small-scale fictional biographies of jazz musicians.  Two of the earliest didn’t even call the subject by name, though in both they were transparently based on Bix Beiderbecke, the prototype for the theme of the portrait-of-the-artist-who-died-young.  In both Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn and Annemarie Ewing’s Little Gate, the Bix character is romantically self-destructive and transcendently improvisatory in his art.  Young Man gained greatly in popularity when a movie of the same name starring A-list actors like Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall was produced a few years after the book’s publication.  A much more entertaining and energetic portrait of Bix (by his real name) appeared in Frederick Turner’s 1929, an expansive whirlwind of a novel that captures the spirit of the artist and the age (the Roaring Twenties), both of which experienced shockingly short shelf lives.  Geoff Dyer’s elegantly written But Beautiful provides an altogether different kind of biographical jazz fiction, a genre the author calls imaginative fiction. It involves the writer taking seven events associated with an equal number of famous jazz men and fictualizing them:  imagining the events as they might have occurred.  The subjects are Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper.  Where are the women? you might ask.  If women and Blacks seem neglected so far, hold on:  both are generously represented in the works that follow.

Take the flurry of short works that center on Buddy Bolden, for example.  Robert Maistros’s short piece, Unpublished Interview with Buddy Bolden, takes place in Bolden’s cell in the Louisiana insane asylum where he died.  Bolden is perplexed by his interviewer who tells him that jazz has become popular, to which Bolden responds, who on earth would wanna talk about no fuck music?  The interviewer then tells Bolden that fuck music has actually been recorded and generated income. When the interviewer names the artists on the first recording, Bolden recalls, with some heat, that one of those bastard musicians had stolen his cherished horn.

Nicholas Christopher’s Tiger Rag also concerns itself with Bolden’s rumored involvement with the production of a recording.  The story goes that Bolden and his band had recorded their signature tune Tiger Rag before Bolden was committed.  If that cylinder can be located, then Bolden’s inimitable sound will not be lost to history, after all.  A book could be written on the lost or stolen instruments, rumored recordings, and enigmatic (and short-lived) demigods who comprise the history of jazz—and jazz fiction—mythology.

Bolden plays a more direct—and dramatic—role in Maistros’s historical novel set in New Orleans toward the turn of the twentieth century, The Sound of Building Coffins.  The plot is centered on the recent lynching of around a dozen Italian immigrants who had been accused of participating in the death of a local police superintendent.  The pandemonium caused by this shocking event is amplified by a violent storm that impels Bolden to the rooftop of a cherished building, where—very dramatically—he lifts his horn to the sky and plays a song of salvation.

The best short piece on Buddy Bolden behind bars is unquestionably Yusef Komunyakaa’s Buddy’s Monologue.  This monologue of Bolden reflecting on his life from his cell in the asylum is directed at an imaginary attendant and told in highly charged, poetic language.  While he talks, he fondles and occasionally plays his beloved cornet and confesses that he played music because he didn’t know anything else.  Finally, he wonders, as we all do, where creativity comes from and how we got to where we are, wherever that might be.  After this story, readers interested in such philosophical issues, particularly as they attach to the enigmatic, mythic Buddy Bolden, will want to turn to Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976)—one of the few crown jewels of the jazz novel, biofactional and otherwise.

If these snippets of Buddy Bolden’s miserable life start, like spring, to really hang you out the most, then turn your attention to Alan Kurtz’s Buddy Bolden on the Holodeck.  It will amuse—and engage—your brain in an entertaining way.  The story’s a spoof on mad scientist stories and movies.  It takes place, naturally, on a dark and stormy night in a secluded software laboratory where Dr.  Rappaccini and Herr Doktor Frankenstein would have felt at home.  An interviewer—Kurtz, like the author—is interviewing a pixilated professor who claims to have reanimated (or simulated, as the scientist insists) Buddy Bolden and his sidemen performing their signature tune, Funky Butt.  The scientist claims he was able to accomplish this heroic feat through retrograde engineering, a process involving the scientist (and Igor?) in analyzing the styles of all the great cornetists and trumpeters from King Oliver to Dizzy Gillespie and then mathematically extrapolating preceding styles through regression analysis and recursive algorithms and back to Bolden.  It seems just crazy enough to work.  You try it.

Robert Johnson is to the blues what Buddy Bolden is to jazz.  Both of them were supernally gifted, tragically short-lived (enhancing their mysteriousness), and the subject of juicy rumors concerning lost recordings, traffic with the devil, and lascivious behavior.  In Robert Wall’s Fat Man Blues, Johnson is just one of half a dozen bluesmen who vitalize the novel, and though he occupies limited space, he emerges as a vivid personality who was instrumental in shaping the Mississippi Delta blues.  Johnson also plays a limited but vibrant role in Robert Frazier’s Robert Johnson’s Freewheeling Jazz Funeral—a book (an anti-novel) that takes us inside the consciousness of the great blues innovator as he plays his music and interacts with his bandmates.

Johnson’s role in Alan Greenberg’s screenplay Love in Vain:  A Vision of Robert Johnson is as vivid as it is in the other stories, but his character dominates the excursion into the center of African-American blues life during the Depression.  Johnson and his fellow bluesmen and their music are rendered in vivid detail.  It’s as if the author has scooped up the scattered facts of Johnson’s life and shaped them into a convincing, well-rounded portrait.  Two scenes stick in the mind long after the book is finished:  Johnson’s thrilling head-cutting contest with the reigning bluesman of the day, Charley Patton, and his mystification with the technology of the recording studio.  Blues fans will delight in the 50 single-spaced pages on blues history the author has appended to his book.

For modern jazz fans, music and literature, Billie Holiday is easily as popular as Bolden and Johnson, but no major, extended fictional work on her life has yet appeared.  This is also true of Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Carmen McRae, Peggy Lee, and several other major vocalists.  Most of them make brief appearances in works featuring other artists.  To track down your favorites, see pages 426-429 of this book. 

Holiday is at the center of Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz’s Billie Holiday, a fictional biography that employs a strikingly unusual technique.  In the first place, it dramatizes several events from the great singer’s life from the perspective of three different characters, almost as if the authors were influenced by the technique of Roshoman.  And, secondly, it embodies these events in graphic novel form.  The story itself is saturated with drugs, booze, and sex, all of which are overlaid with sadness.  Like too many works of jazz fiction, Billy Holiday makes for a grim reading experience.  Another painful presentation of the quagmire of jazz life can be found in Christopher Dean Elliott’s Gigs:  A Novel About Jazz Musicians.

A shorter, more focused splinter of Holiday’s life is available in Zadie Smith’s Crazy They Call Me, which takes us inside the tormented vocalist’s consciousness as she sings in front of a large audience.  What are they here for, she wonders; what are they thinking about as I sing my heart out?  They are surely more interested in the self you present than in the emotions that shape that self:  the surprise you feel when you take full control of the music you’ve sung a hundred times and feel, at this moment, you’re singing it for the first time, as if being directed by God to create.

Wesley Brown’s collection of connected stories in Dance of the Infidels provides a less depressing presentation of jazz musicians and their fans during troubled times.  The times are the years surrounding WW 2, the milieu the Harlem jazz clubs and dance halls.  Most of the numerous players and places are based on real life models:  the Savoy and Cotton Club to name just two of the famous venues; and Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billie Holiday play often vivid cameos.  One story (Between a Shadow and a Smile) imagines a very young Dexter Gordon arriving in Harlem for the first time, after an endless bus trip from L.A., and being shown the ropes by the not-much-older Illinois Jacquet.  Another (Body and Soul) portrays Coleman Hawkins nervously returning to the Harlem he had left years earlier and fretting that the new music may have passed him by.  Yet another (Too Young for the Blues) shows Ella Fitzgerald meeting a fan who had gone to the same orphanage, taking her out of the dance hall, and skipping rope with her while improvising a kiddie song (A-Tisket-A-Tasket?).

Whit Frazier’s Harlem Mosaic also explores the vibrant cultural scene of Harlem a decade or so before the stories in Dance of the Infidels.  The narration novelizes the poignant relationship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as they embrace the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance in its glory year of 1927.  They dream of creating a folk opera based on the stories and legends of the poor southern Blacks the anthropologist Hurston has been gathering.  Their ambition to compete in the same arena as George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess receives a vital boost when they gain the financial backing of a wealthy white benefactress who insists on being addressed as Godmother.  No one needs to be reminded of what inevitably happens when a Black artist becomes indebted to a white patron.  [Two other novels that take place primarily in Harlem in the magic year of 1927 are Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Joe Okonkwo’s Jazz Moon.  Neither contains historical characters.]

There are biographical characters aplenty in Dave Chisholm’s Chasin’ the Bird:  Charlie Parker in California.  Like Sampayo and Muñoz’s Billie Holiday, this is a graphic novel told from a variety of perspectives.  The narrative takes place in California, starting in 1945, and concerns the transformation in jazz when Parker and Dizzy Gillespie brought East Coast bebop to the West Coast.  In the two years they were there, the prodigiously talented, shockingly unpredictable Parker was unrecognizable from one day to the next.  At his most transcendent, he was a seeker-after-truth like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane; at other times he was a drug-addled vagrant living on the street.  After spending half a year at the mental hospital at Camarillo, he returned to L.A. for a time, full of new musical ideas.  One of the most intriguing fictional portraits of Parker is Julio Cortázar’s novella The Pursuer, which focuses on Johnny