Word: jazzman
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...Peter Gunn's have to do is wince while their man absorbs his beatings. Usually they know did what to whom, and they can be that Pete will survive with his features unscrambled. While the mayhem builds up though, the show offers a fine sound track. Jazzman Henry Mancini, who boasts some 50 movie credits, composes scores for each show, leads leman band through a whining, insinuating background good enough to become foreground fairly often in the series whenever Pete drops by the club where the apple of his private eye is singing. The music is a lot cooler...
...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 has little to do with it. Implicit in the book is the notion that Jazzman Pool died the death of a poet who lived in a country that does not give much houseroom to poetry. Author Holmes comes no closer to proving this case than do the little-magazine intellectuals for whom it is routine cocktail-party chatter...
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...
...Jazzman Camp wields his gallused, honky-tonk style on an Emory Cook record called The New Clavichord. The old-fashioned clavichord has a gentle tinkle, but partly through the recording technique, Camp gives such numbers as Wing and a Prayer and Cocktails for Two an ice-edged, splintered sound full of white fire and ghostly glimmer. In Slow Slow Blues he etches some wonderfully spidery lines. The sound is not for everybody, but Camp is convinced: "It brings out the contrapuntal lines. It lends itself to blues beautifully...
Although he rarely composes any more, Trumpeter Davis recently sketched some music for a French movie entitled Lift to the Gallows ("about a man who has committed the perfect crime-until he got stuck in an elevator"). In Europe he is perhaps the most widely imitated modern U.S. jazzman. No matter how closely young musicians may listen to him, Davis hates to take a backward look at his work. "You always see how you would have done it different," he says. "If you play good for eight bars, it's enough-for yourself...