Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story sent out by the local bureau of United Press International, which had bought the fake interview as the cool truth, and forthwith dispatched it without credit to Gleason's column. Said the U.P.I, story: "San Francisco's famed 'beatsters' are shaving off their beards, Jazz Musician Shorty Pederstein explains, 'The beard has lost its effect and is now respectable. To wear a beard is no distinction. Not to wear a beard is the strongest pattern of nonconformity...
...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. But he wound up broke, sodden drunk, embittered; soon he would be dead. In The Horn, way-out Novelist John Clellon Holmes tries to suggest the forces that destroyed Edgar Pool. He does not succeed, but in failing he has still written the most interesting novel about...
...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 corn-or horn. That Edgar Pool is a Negro...
...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, and at last The Horn became so good that jazz fans and jazz pros alike revered him. There was always too much booze, and when it failed to give him the kicks he needed, the dope pushers showed another way. At the end, Pool lost his virility, his musical control, his desire to live. He was alone, even when the joint...
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...