Young Man with a Horn, by Dorothy Baker, Gary Giddins - afterword
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Young Man with a Horn, by Dorothy Baker, Gary Giddins - afterword
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Rick Martin loved music, and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life.
Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry - though not the life - of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
Young Man with a Horn, by Dorothy Baker, Gary Giddins - afterword- Amazon Sales Rank: #118623 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-10-08
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 436 minutes
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Over the years, I've read this novel a dozen times By Jesse Kornbluth See if this grabs you: "What I'm going to do now is to write off the story of Rick Martin's life, now that it's over, now that Rick is washed up and gone, as they say, to his rest." That's the first line. It's a story about genius and glory and doom, about a boy who taught himself how to play piano and trumpet and was, at 20, bound for glory, and well before his 30th birthday, was dead.The great novel of the 1920s is The Great Gatsby. A `20s story that's almost as good is this one --- the fictionalized story of Leon Bismarck "Bix" Beiderbecke (1903 - 1931), who rocketed out of Davenport, Iowa with a sound so distinctive his only competition was Louis Armstrong. Bix was as shy as he was talented, damaged in a way that's still not quite clear. But he could play --- Lord, could he play.In a big band, Beiderbecke was the trumpet player with the spectacularly clear sound. As a pianist, he was an innovator. On both instruments, there's a combination of cool distance, hot jazz and the new kind of music coming from Europeans like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Louis Armstrong said it best: "Lots of cats tried to play like Bix; ain't none of them play like him yet."No one could pin Bix down. An 8-measure solo here, a short phrase there --- he seemed to be making it up as he went along, but he couldn't be, no one was that inventive. Listen for yourself:Dorothy Baker, who also wrote Cassandra at the Wedding, conjures all of it --- the life, the music, the recklessness, the shyness, the loneliness, the booze. She writes wonderful scenes: the afternoon in a mission that young Rick Martin teaches himself Hymn 14 ("He stayed there until dark, and I can scarcely believe it myself, but the story goes that he could play the piano by dark; he could play number 14 on the piano by dark"), and how he sits outside the Cotton Club night after night, in his early teens, listening to bands and memorizing their songs ("It wasn't that they were loud; it was that they were so firm about the way they played, no halfway measures, nothing fuzzy"), and the night he gets to sit in with professionals ("Rick laid his cigarette in a groove above the keyboard where another cigarette had been laid sometime, sat down again, and said, `What do you think of this?'"). He gets hired to play in a band that caters to college kids in the California summer ("Rick dressed like a college boy, his hands were clean, and there was nothing much wrong with the way he talked, but there was something in his face that marked him as no college boy").From there, it's the top of the mountain and down the hill. Baker can see what's discordant in Rick Martin: "the gap between a man's musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life." She can editorialize: "He expected too much from music and he came to it with too much of a need." And she can nail a truth in the fewest possible words: A bandleader is "handsome in a way that doesn't mean anything."And she knows the price of fame. Imagine the white version of Jimi Hendrix --- a good-looking lad in a world dominated by black artists who do it, he feels, just a bit better than he ever will. That's Bix Beiderbecke's relation to Louis Armstrong, and that's Rick Martin's sense of himself in comparison to his black idols. Is it surprising, then, that he never sleeps? That he drinks and drinks and drinks? That his romances are duds?I first read this book when I was 12. I loved it because it did not condescend or sugarcoat. It took me inside the music --- it made me want to find an instrument and learn it. So I got myself a trumpet and tried to be Bix. Never made it. But then, no one ever has.Got a kid who's into music? This is the book. Interested in the Jazz Age? Ditto. Or just looking for a short novel that you can't put down? Here you go.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. "The way to know what happens in music is to hear it, to hear it from the inside out." By Mary Whipple In this newly reprinted, remarkably "fresh" novel from 1938, considered the "first jazz novel" ever written, author Dorothy Baker takes the reader into the mind and heart of a young white boy in the 1920s whose desire to excel as a creative jazz musician is so overwhelming that he lets nothing get in his way - not the fact that he is only a child when he begins to pursue his interest, not the fact that he is an orphan, not the fact that he is supposed to be in school, and not the fact that he has no instrument to play.Compelled by forces he does not understand, young Paul Martin, at fourteen, teaches himself to play the piano by skipping school and practicing during the day on the piano at a black mission church, later switching to the trumpet when he discovers that with luck and hard work, he can afford to buy one at a pawn shop. It is at the bowling alley where he works setting up pins that he meets Smoke Jordan, an eighteen-year-old black man who gets so caught up in the rhythm of sweeping the alley's floor that he forgets the purpose of his job and dances instead to his own inner music. Smoke and Rick become best friends, inseparable, both totally committed to their interest in jazz. Their relationship is one of the treasures of this novel as these two come to trust each other completely, sharing their lives in unexpected ways.Before he is even twenty-one, Rick is working in New York, but here life becomes much more complicated, and it is in these last two sections of the novel that the author's insights make Rick's jazz life and the conflicts that sometimes arise with his personal life come fully alive. Basing the musical career (though not the life) of Rick Martin on that of the real jazz trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke, Dorothy Baker performs the remarkable feat of getting inside the musician's head, sensitively describing the details of how it FEELS to take a simple melody and then twist it, turn it upside down, and even inside out, so that it takes on a completely new life. She allows the less creative reader to appreciate a jazz musician's ability to recognize and savor that magic moment when his creativity with a particular solo or piece of music has reached its peak, while also recognizing that this moment with this piece of music will never happen again in quite the same way.The compulsion for a creative artist like Rick to continue going and going and going in search of the perfect sound, the perfect arrangement, and the perfect combination of instruments and thematic elements, no matter how exhausted he may be physically, is presented with sympathy and understanding, and it is here that Baker shows her full recognition of the possible hazards of the obsessed life. In order for Rick to stay up virtually around the clock in search of continuous "perfect moments" with his music, he begins to rely on alcohol, both on and off-stage. Vividly, she shows the toll that this destructive pattern takes on Rick's body, as it also did on that of Bix Beiderbecke, a sad but not unexpected result in this story of two shooting stars, one fictional and one real.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Dorothy Baker manages to do with words what her fictional ... By Nina Handler Dorothy Baker manages to do with words what her fictional character Rick Martin does with a trumpet. The very writing itself is evocative of jazz. The plot is minimal and there are no surprises; the Prologue lays it all out beforehand. But this book makes you feel the way musicians must feel about the music they play, and that's quite a feat.
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