Word: horned
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...contributes a jazz arrangement of a Monteverdi chaconne. Entitled No Green Mountains (a play on Monteverdi's name), it holds its baroque flavor and allows for some intriguing solo-trumpet embroidery on the main theme. Most successful work is Transformation, by Composer Schuller, who is both the first horn player of the Metropolitan Opera and a sometime player in jazz combos. His tautly constructed piece opens with a wistful theme, gradually begins to swing, gives way to free improvisation and a swelling riff in the wind instruments. All the pieces have their fascinating moments, but they seem less intent...
...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...
Author Holmes knows his jazz world. One of his scenes - a band rehearsal - is as funny and true as any writing about jazz in a long while. The Horn is sententious and overwritten, but it still manages to be a plausible and moving novel...
With Relish. In Wilmington, Del., Ernest H. Carter was fined $550 for drunken driving after he pulled into a brightly illuminated suburban police station, tooted his horn, told a cop he was there for curb service, ordered coffee and a hamburger...