Word: harlemization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...show brings back just about everything that ever belonged to the girl who was the toast and tattle of France, whose sexy, banana-girdle routines led the Lost Generation through the rhythms of le jazz hot. There is a showboat Cakewalk, some St. Louis blues, a song of Harlem in hard times and of Negroes in Paris; there is a flash of the old Folies and the new ballets; there is Josephine doing a Gypsy ballet and "The Charleston Forever" in black gold-spangled tights...
...hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings pick up, and with the addition of two more saxophonists and a drummer, the outfit seems on the point of blowing itself a big name...
...skinny, 15-year-old girl is well schooled in human relations (she has been a Harlem prostitute for a year) and chemistry (drinking water, she knows, helps the smoker extract that last bit of nourishment from a reefer). But Lu Ann is a little weak in geography. "Now Man," she says, "you aint gassin me you really got an ocean you can get to on the subway?" Duke Custis, a knife-scarred hard case at 14, knows well enough where the Atlantic is, even has a vague notion that Europe lies somewhere beyond Coney Island...
...sometime commercial artist and maker of television commercials, Schwartz roams Manhattan with his 16-lb., battery-operated recorder, flicks it on in buses. subways, cabs, restaurants and elevators. His recordings of street singers, songs by national groups, church services in Harlem have provided the basis for nearly a dozen pop songs, including Sippin' Soda (Guy Mitchell), The Pendulum Song (Nelson Riddle), Wimoweh (Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers). In his midtown Manhattan apartment, such singers as Pete Seeger, Josh White, Harry Belafonte have sampled Schwartz's 1,500 hours of recorded tape, including more than 5,000 songs from...
...Void"). What emerges is an allegory on whatever the reader chooses-the perversity of man, the bright illusion of love, the red-eyed aurochs of war. Dotted throughout the book are moon-mad digressions-a plan to enroll farm boys in the Joy Scouts of America, hike them into Harlem for instruction in reefer rolling; a 14-page hypothesis, mostly in verse, on why Ireland is underpopulated (it wasn't the snakes, Goodman theorizes, that nearsighted St. Patrick banished...