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Young Man with a Horn (1938)

door Dorothy Baker

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Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life.nbsp; Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry--though not the life--of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.… (meer)
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1-5 van 6 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
really outstanding. My entire book club loved it, and we had a great discussion. Some of the best music (jazz) writing I've read, wonderful dialogue, and some very deft-touch writing on race, talent, and human connection. ( )
  lisapeet | Dec 13, 2022 |
Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that
he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on
top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life.
  CarrieFortuneLibrary | Sep 5, 2022 |
Young Man With a Horn sounds like the title of a movie, which of course it is: released in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas, Lauran Bacall, and Doris Day. Perhaps less famous is the novel on which it was based written by Dorothy Baker and published in 1938. The story is a fictional biography of a young jazz musician (Rick Martin) who burnt out at the relatively young age of 28 mainly through an addiction to alcohol. I have not seen the film but apparently in the film version, the women in his life were also instrumental in his downfall, but this motif is underplayed in the book. Women were almost incidental in Rick's life, his passion was playing music, which would probably not have been such good subject for the box office receipts of this film.

A simple story then, but Dorothy Baker does something different; she is intent on getting across to her readers Rick Martins passion for music. She describes the intensity of his playing and his need to push himself further in musical terms, that amateur musicians and others who have similar passions will understand. Rick Martin was a poor white boy from Los Angeles who discovered he had an ear for tunes and set about teaching himself to play hymns on an old piano he found in the basement of a church. The church congregation were black folks and when they discovered Rick one night they frightened him half to death. Rick could be described as a "loner" only meeting people through music and when he does make a friend it is with Smoke a black youth who plays drums. It is Smoke who gets Rick interested in jazz as Rick is already changing around the hymn tunes that he has learned and the two young men hook up with Jeff Williams and his hot band of black musicians. Rick finds himself in a world of young black people in 1920's America, but to Rick and the book as a whole this is incidental, because it is the music that drives his world.

Later Rick gets a job as a musician in an all white band as he would be expected to do, but although he enjoyed the playing he is continually striving to be the best and finds the only way of really stretching himself is to play with the black musicians. He becomes relatively well off and very much respected: a musician's musician, he has switched from piano to trumpet and is the star in whichever group he performs. He cannot however push his head through the glass ceiling that he encounters, his attempts to get a band featuring black musicians to record does not attract the financial backing that he needs. He marries a society white girl who is attracted by his talent, but cannot live her life centred around Rick's music and Rick becomes frustrated and uses alcohol to fuel his talent........

The first sentence of the book says:

"In the first place he shouldn't have got himself mixed up with negroes"

This proves to be ambiguous, because without being "mixed up" in the world of black musicians Rick probably would not have discovered his passion, his purpose in life. The musical world that these black people inhabit is the backbone of this novel and Baker makes a wonderful job of describing the feeling of joy that they find in the playing of jazz music. Here is Jeff Williams leader and piano player putting the band through their paces:

"Jeff led them to it with four bars in the key and then the horns came in together held lightly by a slim melody by three separate leashes. Then Jeff led the rhythm to the drums, and the piano became the fourth voice, and from then on harmony prevailed in a strange coherence, each man improvising wildly on his own and the four of them managing to fit it together and tightly. Feeling ran high, and happy inspiration followed happy inspiration to produce counterpoint that you'd swear somebody had sat down and worked out note by note on nice clean manuscript paper. But nobody had: it came into the heads of four men and out again by way of three horns and one piano"

Dorothy Baker's prose takes inspiration from the hard-bitten crime novels such as those by Raymond Chandler that were flooding the market in the 1930's. Her novel has run its course in just over 120 pages and the feeling is that hardly a word has been wasted. Quite simply this is one of the best novels that pins down a musical milieu that I have read and so 5 stars. ( )
2 stem baswood | Sep 15, 2019 |
Young Man with a Horn. The novel catapulted Baker into the literary limelight – and for many years it remained her best known work having been made into a film starring Doris Day, Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall. I read her later novel Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) a few months ago – and loved it. Cassandra at the wedding remains my favourite of the two – but Young Man with a Horn is a brilliantly assured novel, wonderfully atmospheric, it simply oozes jazz. Although not in any way biographical, the novel is said to have been inspired by the life of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke.

“Our man is, I hate to say it, an artist, burdened with that difficult baggage, the soul of an artist. But he hasn’t got the thing that should go with it – and which I suppose seldom does – the ability to keep the body in check while the spirit goes on being what it must be. And he goes to pieces, but not in any small way. He does it so thoroughly that he kills himself doing it.”

The young man in question is Rick Martin – who we are introduced to by an unnamed narrator. From the prologue we know that Rick has already come to a sad end – and that the story of his all too short life is being told by someone who witnessed his rise and fall.

“There isn’t much to it, in its bare outline. Rick was born in Georgia five or ten minutes before his mother died and some ten days before his father checked out and left him with his seventeen year old aunt and her brother. These two worked their way to Los Angeles eight years later and brought him with them; and there he grew up in the way he apparently had to go. He learned to play the piano by fooling around with the pianos in churches and roadhouses – any place, in fact, where there was a piano that could be got at and fooled around with. And because he had right in his bones whatever it takes to make music, he became while he was still a kid a very good pianist. But a piano wasn’t exactly right for him, and he turned to brass finally; he earned enough money to buy himself a horn.”

We first meet Rick when he is just a boy, with no idea at all of playing music, no idea of jazz, and the musicians who make jazz their lives. With his aunt and uncle – who have charge of him (I won’t say care) Rick moves to Los Angeles. Although only young, Rick is left largely to his own devices, he has a bed of his own a cupboard for his clothes and that it seems is pretty much all he has. There is little mention of his uncle and aunt (a brother and sister who both go out to work) except to say that his aunt provides him with trousers from the factory where she works. Rick has struggled to get on at school – so many other kids already far ahead of him. After grammar school – from where everyone graduates no matter what – Rick has to enrol at High school – but for a year or so he simply doesn’t go.

Instead Rick takes to hanging round the All Soul’s Mission, which is empty for much of the day. Here Rick begins to mess around with the piano – and a musician is born. Rick finds he can pick up a tune quickly – he practises all day – until the mission becomes too dark for him to see. All Rick can think of is music, improving, trying new things – it develops into an obsession. Finding a job at the local bowling alley – for a time still skipping school, until they catch up with him, Rick is desperate to save up enough money to buy a trumpet – having decided he wants to play the horn. Here he meets Smoke Jordan, a jazz musician himself, Rick finds in Smoke a life-long friend, and through him enters into the world of jazz.

“After Rick came to Gandy’s, Smoke knew with the instinct of a compass where his audience was, and he came to sweep almost exclusively behind the bowling alleys where there was no great need of it. And there it was that the black one taught the white one what rhythm is, and not by precept, either. By example.”

The jazz world in the 1920’s is a very colour-conscious world. There are black musicians and white musicians and they generally don’t play together. Rick is white, Smoke Jordan is black, and the jazz musicians that he introduces Rick to are also black. While the white musicians are the ones who become famous – the black musicians play in relative obscurity. Rick just wants to play jazz. I had expected to encounter the unpleasant racial epithets of the time – and while they made me uncomfortable, I was cheered by Rick’s unconcern of colour. He chooses his friends and colleagues among the people who he admires, who can teach him something and with whom he shares a great passion.

The novel skips forward a few years, and we meet Rick at twenty – he has now become a gifted horn player. Jack Stuart a bandleader from Balboa – a seaside town thirty miles away – takes Rick on as first trumpet.

From Balboa Rick goes to New York, this time poached by another big time band leader. In New York Rick finds himself back with Smoke Jordan and the other musicians he had regaled his friends in Balboa with stories of. Playing and recording with whichever group of musicians want him, Rick plays jazz most of the night, and sleeps most of the day. Rick is destined for stardom it seems – still so young and at the peak of his brilliance. It is his meeting with Amy North which seems to herald the beginning of the end. Rick is bowled over by Amy, and rashly marries her, predictably perhaps the relationship is a disaster – and from here on the end really isn’t far away.

It is in the ‘voice’ of this novel I think that Baker really shines – so authentic it gives an extra dimension to the atmosphere of this novel. While some of the musical details might well go a little over the heads of those of us who don’t play or read music – the non-musician can still appreciate the all-encompassing obsession that truly gifted jazz musicians enjoy. The relationship between Rick and Smoke poignantly portrayed with subtle understanding is one of my favourite aspects of the novel. ( )
1 stem Heaven-Ali | May 8, 2016 |
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The inspiration for the writing of this book has been the music, but not the life, of a great musician, Leon (Bix) Beiderbecke, who died in the year 1931. The characters and events of the story are entirely fictitious and do not refer to real musicians, living or dead, or to actual happenings.
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What I'm going to do is to write off the story of Rick Martin's life, now that it's all over, now that Rick is washed up and gone, as they say, to his rest.
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Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life.nbsp; Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry--though not the life--of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

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