Kind of Blue Books: Novels about Jazz Musicians

In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become “as indestructible as watercress sandwiches.” The irony of this, he noted, was that jazz, “with its overheated, bleary terminology and ghettoish aspects, is perhaps the hardest of all artforms to penetrate persuasively.”

It didn’t stop a couple generations of novelists from trying. After someone on Twitter asked for recommendations of novels about music and musicians recently, I began to jot down a list of just the ones about jazz and jazz musicians I could think of and was surprised how the list kept growing. Perhaps the best-known of these are one of the earliest, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938), which has been reissued as an NYRB Classic, and the best selling, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Algren’s book was more about drug addiction than jazz, and many of those who followed in his footsteps found it as hard not to mix up the two as did an unfortunate number of jazz musicians themselves.

Having played in an amateur big band for years, I’ve long taken an interest in books about jazz, but I won’t deny that the nonfictional ones — particularly coming from the pen of a master like Balliett, Gene Lees, Ted Gioia, or Stanley Crouch — tend, on average, to be far superior to their fictional counterparts. There’s just something about fiction and jazz than often comes out like mustard on chocolate: as great as the two may be on their own, put together they do neither a favor.

Approached as genre novels — which means, I guess, that you can set your critical brow down to middle or lower — however, they can have the same appeal as a whodunnit or western. Those same qualities of atmosphere, clichéd characters, and predictable plots that kill a book’s chance of critical praise can provide such the kind of reliable formula that makes for good escapism. Or, as another reviewer put it, one can become a willing “victim of a sort of déjà vu or déjà lu effect.” Here, then, are a dozen-plus jazz novels to enjoy.

• The Giant Swing, by W. R. Burnett (1932)

I’d call this a half-way jazz novel. It’s about what happens when an amusement park piano player gets it into his head to start composing music. At first, everyone thinks it’s a joke, but when he meets a violinist with some training in orchestration, he ends up producing an opera titled The Giant Swing, which is set in … an amusement park. It’s halfway jazz because Burnett’s description of his hero’s music is clearly taken from George Gershwin’s “serious” compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and Porgy and Bess — i.e., jazz-inspired but without the improvisational element. The story was later filmed as Dance Band (1941).

 

• Send Me Down, by Henry Steig (1941)

This, one of the earliest novels about a jazz musician, might just be the best when it comes to capturing both the business and the art of performing jazz. The story follows Frank and Pete Davis, brothers playing trombone and tenor sax (ala Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), from the first time they pick up their horns in band class to their commercial and artistic success leading a swing band. The book is full of practical details about working as a musician that suggests that Steig spent a good deal of time listening to veterans of the road.

It’s also probably the first to address what made playing jazz so different from playing any other type of music before it. “Did you ever hear of Joe Venuti?” Frank asks a violinist interested in joining his band.

Well, he’s about the best of the jazz violinists. And by jazz violinist I mean something very different from the fiddlers who play in most dance orchestras. I mean a man who can play hot improvisations, a man who can play inventions extemporaneously in jazz idiom. There aren’t more than six or eight in the whole country who can do it well — probably the whole world. If I wanted a violinist I would try to find such a man. A Joe Venuti.

“But I don’t want a violin!” Frank continues. “The way I’ve worked things out there’s absolutely no place for it” — meaning that Steig also understood something that was beginning to be a major factor in the shift from hot jazz to swing: the importance of orchestration and arrangements.

Send Me Down is likely the most unjustly neglected novel on this list. Despite its — for the time — unusual subject, it was good enough to convince a hard-nosed reviewer like the novelist Kate O’Brien to declare, “There are not at this time of day many novels that can be called original, but Send Me Down is unmistakably one of them.”

 

• Little Boy Blues, by George Willis (1947)

The last book in the forgotten magnum opus of this genre, a trilogy called “Three Musicians’ loosely based on the careers of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Duchin, and other white musicians who got their start in the 1920s’ hot jazz era. The first novel, Tangleweed (1943), followed a musician who got caught in the trap of booze and drugs. The second, The Wild Faun (1945), took the other direction and told about a talented soloist who sold out and became a big star playing non-threatening “sweet” music. Lou Carey, the protagonist of Little Boy Blues sticks with his passion, staying true to jazz, but also proves a first-class heel who cheats on the woman who loves him.

Willis, who was a musician himself, knew the lot of a touring player living out of a suitcase and riding the band bus from one town to another, and the kind of places where they performed:

You can walk tonight into the Union and find that nothing real has ever changed there. You can walk up to the bandstand with its tiny, scarred rail behind which the musicians sit secure, and after you have put your dime in the kitty, you can ask those boys to play a tune for you. They will understand. And one of them will stand up to the microphone while the pianist accompanies him, and in the dim light and the smoke the young man will ask if anyone in the house loves him, for you who had a dime but could not sing it, and everyone will understand. For a moment in the night, everyone will be silent, and each at his table, or in his booth, or with his instep hooked on the railing at the bar, will be asking, too, in his heart and in his own peculiar way, if anyone there loves him—the song said they did and somebody must.

He’s also the only writer on this list who would refer to “a Shangri-la, a never-never land, or more closely a kind of White House … the quarters of the fabulous Local 802 of the union to which they all belonged, the American Federation of Musicians.”

 

• Little Gate, by Annemarie Ewing (1947)

The only title on this list written by a woman. Ewing was a journalist who specialized in profiles of swing band leaders and innovative musicians such as Raymond Scott. This novel, similar to Willis’s followed the career of a trumpet player who gets tangled up in a messy marriage. From the book’s reviews, I regret that Ewing’s publishers didn’t encourage her to write a collection of profiles — ala Balliett and Lees — instead of a novel. This, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example:

When the author talks music, she talks first-hand, directly and without self-consciousness. Unhappily, she felt obliged to make a Book out of it, with a well-trammeled grade B plot containing a lady gangster and a lost week-end. The plot thickens but doesn’t jell; the dialogue is delivered on cue; and the music fades far, far away.

 

• Dupree Blues, by Dale Curran (1948)

Dupree Blues is almost a novelization — except in this case, of a blues song rather than a movie:

Betty told Dupree
She wanted a diamond ring
And Dupree told Betty,
“I’ll give you most anything.”

Now he didn’t want Betty
To know he didn’t have a thing.
He killed that jewelry man,
Gave Betty that diamond ring.

Or as the Hartford Courant’s reviewer summed up this book, “When a man is addicted to liquor and hot music, he will not necessarily get into trouble. But add a beautiful blonde — and he is doomed.” Bonus points for featuring a trombone player, though.

 

• The Hot and the Cool, by Edwin Gilbert (1953)

Gilbert specialized in writing middle-brow, mid-best-seller-list novels that focused on particular settings: an architectural firm in Native Stone, Detroit automotives in American Chrome, a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment house in The Beautiful Life. The Hot and the Cool focused on a sextet of jazz musicians and their struggle to break through (perhaps hoping for something along the lines of the Brubeck Quartet’s splash). Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Balliett gave Gilbert credit for accuracy in his descriptions of the practical details of a musician’s life, but when it came to writing about music, he said Gilbert’s prose “reminded me of a man trying to carry on a rapid monologue underwater.”

 

• Solo, by Stanford Whitmore (1955)

Think of this as the Atlas Shrugged of jazz novels. Its hero, Virgil Jones, is sort of a cross between Art Tatum and Lennie Tristano — in other words, a piano god but, you know, intellectual? And at the core of his philosophy is … himself. He hands out cards reading “I AM THE LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THE WORLD” (though without an address, but I suppose the last individual in the world wouldn’t need one). This was Whitmore’s one and only novel. He soon found more profitable work as the lead writer for James Garner’s TV western Maverick.

 

• Sideman, by Osborn Duke (1956)

When I wrote about this book back in 2009, I acknowledged that I’d have put it in the Justly Neglected if not for the fact that its lead character is a trombonist. As a wannabe sliphorn wrangler myself, I had to give it some bonus stars. Trombone players need love, too. However, the fact is that any book that takes almost 450 pages to cover two weeks in the life of a big band playing a gig at a Santa Monica amusement park had better justify that demand on its reader’s time by being awesome. And Sideman is not.

What I did appreciate — and what is rare among jazz novels — was Duke’s solid grasp of the difference between musical proficiency and the capacity to improvise. Duke’s hero Bennie Bell packs up his horn in the end because he comes to realize that he might be sharp enough to play the book and write innovative compositions, but he simply doesn’t have the chops to play a half-decent solo. And that — far more often than drugs — is what usually brings a would-be jazz musician’s career to an end.

 

• It’s Always Four O’Clock, by James Updyke (1956)

Twenty-four years after The Great Swing, W. R. Burnett returned to take jazz head-on, though under a pseudonym for contractual reasons. In this case, he tells about the rise and break-up of a jazz trio — guitar, piano, and bass. He skirts around the challenge of trying to describe jazz by having a character intone, “Music is a hard thing to write about. Almost impossible, in fact: it’s just something you listen to — so I won’t bend your ears with too much talk about it.”

The trio’s bass player, Royal Mauch, sounds as if Burnett might have encountered the young Charle Mingus, then just making his name in L.A.:

This Royal — he broke everything up into pieces. The word ‘fracture’ was invented for him. I don’t know anything about Art — with a capital B, standing for Bushwa, to be polite about it, but if Royal had ever decided to paint, he would have painted those cockeyed looking things where the woman has two eyes on one side and looks like she was cut out of a marshmallow with a cleaver.

 

• Hot, Sweet, and Blue, by Jack Baird (1956)

Baird was a former drummer who led a band called the Jesters of Rhythm that played around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. After marrying and quickly fathering five children, however, he took a steadier job as a liquor store clerk and began writing pulp novels at night. This one is set in Pittsburgh and features the tragic romance between a white trumpet player and a Black singer. The result was not only unusual in its interracial theme but admirably concise. As Virginia Dale wrote in the New York Times, “You might think that jazz and love and double crossing, gambling and murder would be enough to crowd hundreds of pages, but here it’s all skimmed over in under 150.”

 

• Jive Jungle, by Ida Martucci (1956)

The only fictional outing of a one-time Broadway producer (the musical “Barnum”), this is easily the most obscure and hard-to-find title on this list. I couldn’t find a single review, aside from a brief synopsis in David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2007). The New York Times’ only mention was in their “Books Published Today” item for 12 June 1956: “Novel about a musician.” So there you go.

 

• Second Ending, by Evan Hunter (1956)

An early offering by Ed McBain under his favorite pseudonym, Second Ending follows the example of The Man with the Golden Arm and focuses on the drugs more than the music. Though the main character is a trumpet man, the horn itself proves to be more important as something to hock than something to play. “A dossier on the disintegration phenomenon of addiction and the clawing torment of those who have been hooked,” according to Kirkus Reviews.

 

• Paris Blues, Harold Flender (1957)

Most people familiar with the 1961 movie Paris Blues probably don’t realize it’s based on a book — or that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s characters were invented to appeal to white audiences. In the novel, it’s the Sidney Poitier character, sax man Eddie Cook, who’s the protagonist. A long-time expat, Cook finds his reluctance to return to the racism he remembers at home tested when he falls in love with a black American woman visiting France on her summer holiday. Flender himself was a New York-based writer who usually worked on comic material with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner before the sale of his novel to producer Sam Shaw allowed him to pursue more serious subjects, such as his 1963 account of the evacuation of Danish Jews, Rescue in Denmark.

 

• Somewhere There’s Music, by George Lea (1958)

This first novel won the Avery Hopwood Prize for major fiction in 1957. A clarinet player returns from the Korean War and trades his licorice stick for a bari sax and his adolescent fixation with Dixieland for a fascination with cool jazz. Lea captured the contrast between the jazzman’s passion for music and their passive acceptance of the limbo to which drugs and uncertain income condemns them.

 

• Blow Up a Storm, by Garson Kanin (1959)

This was screenwriter Kanin’s first novel, and it shows. Switching back and forth between present and flashbacks, it follows three musicians from their start as a Dixieland combo through changing styles and ensembles, to their ultimate fortunes and misfortunes. Although Kanin went on to write a number of bestsellers, the best parts of this book are those about the music itself, infused with Kanin’s thirty years of listening as an avid fan.

 

• The Sound, by Ross Russell (1961)

Russell made his mark in jazz history as the owner of Hollywood’s Tempo Music Shop, one of the best places to find jazz recordings in L.A. after the war and as the founder of Dial Records, for which Charlie Parker recorded a hugely influential set of tracks after being released from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Red Travers, the trumpet player in The Sound, is largely based on Parker. Those familiar with Parker’s life can identify the real-life counterparts to most of the book’s characters and Ross later reused much of the material in his Parker biography Bird Lives!.

 

• Man Walking on Eggshells, by Herbert Simmons (1962)

Simmons won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, Corner Boy, in 1957, but he struggled to get his second book written and then published. Unlike most of the books on this list, it not only features a black protagonist but burns with the anger of a Black writer poised at the birth of the Civil Rights movement. For Simmons, jazz is more than just music: “Jazz is the story of the Black men being messed around so bad by the white man that if he could he’d lay down and die from the blues but his soul won’t let him do it.”

Man Walking on Eggshells and Corner Boy were forgotten for over thirty years until Norton brought them back in the late 1990s as part of a short-lived series of “Old School Books” by neglected Black writers. Although Amazon says it still has copies on stock, it’s probably time for Norton (or someone else) to consider another revival.

 

• The Piano Sport, by Don Asher (1966)

Asher, the house piano player at San Francisco’s famous Hungry i nightclub, based this comic novel about a New England Conservatory-trained pianist who moves to the Bay Area and takes a job playing at a strip club very loosely on his own experiences. Asher followed this up with The Electric Cotillion (1970), which took a similar character in a similar situation forward a few years, with the initial excitement and novelty of the San Francisco scene having been replaced with the drag of endless nights playing “Happy Birthday” and “Hava Nagila” at union minimum rates, until an 18-year-old high school dropout arrives to shake things up. Light on the jazz content, both novels are mainly of interest today as snapshots of SF’s swinging Sixties culture. Asher did, however, earn a permanent place in anyone’s jazz library b co-writing Hampton Hawes’ autobiography Raise Up Off of Me.

 

• And Sleep Until Noon, by Gene Lees (1966)

I wrote about this, Lees’ first novel, back in 2010. The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. My assessment: “Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.”

 

• Gig, by James D. Houston (1969)

Gig is about a gig. One night’s work for Roy Ambrose, a lounge pianist at the Seacliff, a fashionable joint in San Francisco known for its scenic views and society clientele. Of all the books on this list, it’s probably the most accurate in its depiction of the life of a working musician as seen through his own eyes. Roy has to deal with drunks, snobs, boors, groupies, clumsy waiters, and a rude owner, but takes it all with the perspective of someone who’ll deal with all of it all over again the next weekend:

I do not program people’s lives. I’m only a piano player. I long ago decided public arguments are silly, and I don’t participate. They solve nothing. No one’s opinions are changed. People argue because they’re good at it. I’ve learned I’m a flop at it. So I keep out of them and keep my distance from those who indulge in argument.

Roy is a true cool blue kind of cat:

Why continue this conspiracy of performers to keep the audience in its place? It’s the very thing that drives musicians to drink, to drugs, to insanity, this egomaniac reluctance to let someone else’s noises mix with their own. Why not let everybody into the act?

“As long,” he hastens to add, “as I continue to be in charge.”

I should mention that several fine novels in this genre from the 1960s have been reissued and are now available in print or eBook editions, including John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, John Williams’s Night Song and Clifford’s Blues, and Mary Weik’s The Jazz Man, a children’s book.