Word: horned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HORN (243 pp.)-John Clellon Holmes-Random House...
...name was Edgar Pool, and he was out of KayCee (Kansas City, that is). Of course, no one but a square called him Edgar or Pool or even Eddie. He was simply "The Horn," and, man, he could really blow. His deeds on the sax and his misdeeds on and off the bandstand made him a legend in his lifetime. The Horn was so hip that he just did not care. He had had all the booze, all the drugs, all the women. And he could blow his horn so marvelously that, through him, jazz achieved a new dimension...
...characters are not real people. Still, reading his book, any sensitive cat might think of someone like Tenor Saxman Lester Young or Charley ("Yard-bird") Parker (who died in 1955 at the age of 35 because he behaved too much like Edgar Pool). The prototype for Geordie. The Horn's No. 1 chick, might be someone like Jazz Singer Billie Holiday. Actually, the resemblances are not important. This is a standard jazz story and, beyond that, basically the standard intellectual's novel about the artist in the U.S. who is somehow made to feel that he is alien...
What is good in The Horn is its good try at isolating the serious jazzman's special brand of musical thinking. Like most good jazzmen, The Horn had the stuff in his blood. He taught himself to play because nothing else seemed to him more worth learning. His mother took in washing; his father was a railroad hand who advised his son to get some kind of steady colored man's job that carried a sure weekly wage. But Edgar Pool could hear nothing but the music within him. So he played, badly at first, but doggedly...
...Sandman. In Ashiya, Japan, a ten-day crackdown on horn blowing was so successful that the only traffic accident during the period involved a driver who fell asleep at the wheel...