Sunday book pick: Dorothy Baker’s jazz novel ‘Young Man With a Horn’ gets you grooving
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“It is the story of a number of things – of the gap between the man’s musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life; of the difference between the demands of expression and the demands of life here below; and finally of the difference between good and bad in a native American art form – jazz music.”
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Dorothy Baker started her novelist career writing about what she liked best – jazz. Published in 1938, Young Man with a Horn is based on the music of the cornet player, Bix Beiderbecke. The afterword by writer and critic Gary Giddins in the NYRB Classics edition of the book mentions that Beiderbecke “showed that jazz was a music of universal expression and not an exclusively African American phenomenon that whites could only mimic.”
Critics were impressed by Baker’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the jazz world, but jazz and film critic Otis Ferguson noted the absence of swing, which was the most popular type of jazz at the time of the novel’s publication. He wrote in his review, “So while I know this to be a good book for any man’s money, I cannot report on just how good it will be to those who, not...