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For over twenty years, publishing quality jazz-themed fiction has been a mission of Jerry Jazz Musician. Hundreds of short stories have appeared on the pages of this website, most all of which can be accessed by clicking here.
A substantial number of novels and stories with jazz music as a component of the story have been published over the years, and the scholar David J. Rife has written short essay/reviews of them, which he has compiled in two valuable resources, Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2008), and a recently published sequel, Jazz Fiction: Take Two. (Several of the stories published on Jerry Jazz Musician are reviewed).
Rife’s work is impressive and worth sharing with Jerry Jazz Musician readers. With his cooperation, essay/review excerpts from Take Two will be published on a regular basis.
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In this edition, Rife writes about jazz novels and short stories that feature stories about jazz music’s international influence.
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…..Jazz Fiction: Take Two is the sequel to Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2008). The earlier work filled a pressing need in jazz studies by identifying and discussing 700 works of fiction with a jazz component.
…..This work picks up where that one left off, around the turn of the 21st century, and surveys over 500 works of jazz-inflected fiction that have appeared since. None of these works, to my knowledge, have been discussed in this context.
…..The essay-reviews at the center of the book are designed to give readers a sense of the plots of the works in question and to characterize their debt to jazz. The entries were written with both the general reader and the scholar in mind and are intended to entertain as well as inform. This alone should qualify Jazz Fiction: Take Two as an unusual and useful reference resource.
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-David J. Rife
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photo via National Archives by unknown photographer
Jazz musicians (including Coleman Hawkins and Stan Getz) playing in Cannes, France
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Jazz’s International Influence
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…..Readers of Jerry Jazz Musician will be intimately familiar with the origin and early history of jazz: how it was born in New Orleans and soon spread, first to Chicago, then New York, and finally all points in between. In fact, as most readers know, it was hugely popular in France, too, especially in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The Montmartre section of Paris was even called “Little Harlem” because of its large contingent of ex-pat American Black musicians and the exciting sound they brought with them. But some may be surprised to learn that jazz was also very popular in China in the interwar years when Black American musicians dominated large jazz orchestras. It was also, unexpectedly, all the rage in Estonia from the ‘30s until today. And just recently (2024) my daughter Gaby sent me a handsome publication from Niš, Serbia, cataloguing with photographs the museum’s holdings of jazz-related artefacts and listing the busy schedule of concerts for the coming year. How about Africa and the Middle East? Since at least the ‘50s, jazz has significantly influenced the music there, and at least two novels (Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz and Jamal Mahjoub’s The Fugitives) dramatize the impact of American jazz on Arabic music. One can only imagine what a jazz orchestra combining African and American instruments might sound like.
…..The assimilation of this essential American art form has been so successful that many claim its prominence has been overshadowed by Japan and Europe. In short, jazz has traveled well and far, as the following examples bear witness.
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..….Related in a lengthy interview by an aged Nathan Mentzel, this is a story of the Jewish experience during the first half and beyond of the twentieth century, beginning in Europe and ending in America. As such, it necessarily embodies such themes and subjects as psychoanalysis, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, pogroms, and the Holocaust. The narrative begins with Nathan and his young friends forming a jazz band in Vienna during the 1920s, then migrating, first to London, then New York, and finally California. Jazz binds the disparate parts of the novel together: not only does the music provide a metaphor connecting European Jews and American Blacks in their quest for freedom but it facilitates, through the person of Coleman Hawkins, their journey from the Old World to the New. Besides Hawkins, who is instrumental to the novel, other historical figures who appear are Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Jonas Salk. Many jazz musicians are mentioned throughout the book and several make cameo appearances. In addition, several scenes of music in performance are nicely realized.
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…..A deeply researched historical novel set in China during the turbulent times preceding the Japanese invasion of Shanghai toward the beginning of WW2. Blending historical figures with a few fictitious ones, the narrative focuses on Thomas Greene, a classically trained pianist from Baltimore who had been, in 1936, recruited to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats in rambunctious Shanghai. Struggling at first with an unfamiliar musical idiom, Greene soon finds a groove and simultaneously achieves undreamed of status and success: after years as a destitute second-rate citizen, he’s become a celebrity with a mansion, servants, and soon a high-born, educated Chinese sweetheart who spies for the Communist Party. Her thoughts early in the story nicely capture the excitement of the historical moment:
Ye Shanghai was what everyone called that time and place—Night in Shanghai, after the popular song by Zhou Xuan. It was a world of pleasure, permission, and nightlife, which was destined to evaporate the moment Shanghai fell to Japan. Jazz was the sun around which the paradise revolved, the rhythm that drove its nights, and agents like my brother Lin Ming made it possible by recruiting jazz men from across the sea and managing their lives in Shanghai. These were the years of the great Black orchestras from America who filled the ballrooms, bringing a marvelous sound that had never been heard in China before.
…..Indeed, jazz is the thread that binds the novel together. Musicians are mentioned, music in performance is dramatized, and (as in passages like the following) Greene’s struggle to master new techniques is highlighted:
Thomas played through the sweat, bending over the keyboard and the slow prance-paddling of ‘Blue Ramble,’ propelled by the peddling, naughty-sounding circles blown by Charles and Ernest on their layered saxophones. Luckily the song was simple melodically—until that one moment in the twelve-bar B section when they came to the sustained chord, six voices with a growling ninth on the bottom from the valve trombone, played by Earl Mutter. It was the key to the song, the unexpected ninth, the twist of fate, the turn, the dissonance. It was the misstep, the instant that changes the course of a life.
…..Jazz fiction buffs will find many analogues between the music—especially its improvisatory nature—and the novel’s structural and thematic framework.
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..….…..A researched historical novel set during Australia’s involvement in Pacific WW2. It borrows the idea for its title from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which—like this novel—revolves around the theme of forbidden romance. It’s 1942 in Sydney and 18-year-old Pearl plays second alto in the girls’ big band at the Trocadero, “the biggest and best ballroom in the Southern Hemisphere,” while her twin brother Martin plays second tenor in the men’s big band. The orchestras alternate sets on a revolving stage illuminated by showbiz lighting. One night after their gigs are over, Martin takes Pearl to an after-hours venue, the Booker T. Washington Club, which caters to Black American soldiers and aboriginals and occasionally allows girls to jam with the guys. Pearl’s life goes into a tailspin when she hears a Black saxophonist solo: she hadn’t believed “her” beloved instrument was capable of creating such sounds with such depth of feeling. When she and the legendary sax man, James Washington, meet, there is an immediate chemistry between them: “sparks fly,” in other words. Although racial segregation is very much in effect in Australia, they enter into a loving, erotic, semi-clandestine relationship while the clouds of war gather above them. Theirs is also a mentor-student relationship as James, at Pearl’s begging, helps her to improve her technique on her horn, which she accomplishes with great effort and much frustration. The passages centering on Pearl’s apprenticeship are excellent:
By her sixth lesson in the gardens, when James thought she was ready, he asked her to play, in succession, all the major scales and their triads, which turned out to be a series of lurching rises and falls, a breathy ladder of awkward progressions. When she achieved the right tone, her fingering was inconsistent, and when the fingering was correct, her embouchure faltered. The two techniques never seemed to unite, and she grew frustrated.
…..She grows even more frustrated, not to mention distraught, when James is deployed to New Guinea to fight in the war. So she hatches an ingenious, if highly improbable, plan to reunite with him. Her scheme, after many frustrating complications, requires her to masquerade as a soldier—a male soldier—who travels from encampment to encampment to play in a band that is often reduced to using makeshift instruments. Along the way, in the mountains and jungles of New Guinea, Pearl becomes a foot soldier, dodging Japanese bullets and discharging a few of her own, always looking out for the welfare of her “gang.” Finally, in a very sweet (and highly romantic) denouement, she is reunited with the love of her life—for a tragically short while.
…..Love in the Years of Lunacy is a story of love and war with its various elements tied together by jazz. One of the novel’s most affecting passages concerns the uplifting effect that playing for the wounded soldiers had on her, making her realize how trivial in comparison was her performing for the posh audiences of the Trocadero:
They played duets on the saxophone and organ, and as the sound of ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’ rose through the trees and vines Pearl was comforted by the smiling faces, the simple happiness the music gave these dying men. It seemed to work better than morphine. Within half an hour, two of them were out of bed, swaying back and forth on unsteady legs, mouthing the words to the songs. And it was at moments like these, even though she was exhausted and starving, that she was able to push herself beyond any known limit and improvise generously on the tunes they begged for, turning it inside out and upside down, always aware that what she was playing might be the last piece of music these men would ever hear.
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…..…..True to its title, this novella bodies forth a rounded portrait of a quirky, loveable soul who bears an unusual name—This Studer—and never leaves home without a genuine smile. He is in fact genuinely happy and strives, with some success, to make others happy, too. Although he and his wife have been married for over 20 years, they are still giddily—and lustfully—in love, and his friendships are equally rewarding. Happiness “came and found him in the moments when he forgot about himself,” challenging the existential idea that hell is other people. The story takes place in Amsterdam where This has come for a week-long gig at the Kapitein [Captain] Bird jazz club. This plays trumpet, and he does so with gusto and fulfilment. Indeed, his capacity for happiness derives from his relationship to the music he conjures and the instrument he makes it on. His trumpet, like the Holy Grail or Maltese Falcon, is a sacred object. The way in which This came to love jazz after disliking it at first is movingly described. It involves his apprenticeship at the feet of his beloved grandfather who passed on his ideas, techniques, and finally his trumpet to his grandson. Later, This returns the favor by passing on his enthusiasm for the more modern modes of the music associated with artists like Miles Davis, Art Pepper, Charlie Mariano, and Kenny Wheeler. One day This happened upon the old man while he was grooving to Archie Shepp’s Fire Music, “snapping his fingers enthusiastically and whistling along with Shepp’s solos.” Small wonder that This’s performances, when he’s at the top of his game, have a transformative effect on him:
When he loses himself in his playing . . . This Studer forgets about his face. He grimaces. At that moment, he breathes music as if it were air, guzzles and sucks at his trumpet as if it provided life-giving sustenance. Although he’s almost fifty, when he’s playing he regains the face of the boy he once was. His fingers move with a mind of their own. The trumpet, now pointing toward the floor and now toward the ceiling, leads him back into himself, takes him apart, deconstructs him, and puts him back together again in the blink of an eye. Now he’s supple, fluid, molten gold, trumpet-gold.
…..How lovely to experience, as we do in this tale, the potentially symbiotic relationship between happiness and jazz.
How lovely to experience, as we do in this tale, the potentially symbiotic relationship between happiness and jazz.
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.,,,,,Jazz journalist and longtime ScandiGeek (a person enamored of all things Swedish) Juliet Brown falls into the assignment of her dreams when she’s sent to Stockholm to interview Bunny Nordqvst, an American émigré who’s been making it big on the sizzling Swedish jazz scene. But just as Juliet starts to get to know the jazzers in Bunny’s circle, her host (and Bunny’s husband) Henrik is viciously murdered on the street. Juliet’s interest in the mystery of who killed this kindly patron of jazz leads, incredibly, to her entanglement in two other spectacular real-life mysteries involving jazz-loving men: the assassination in 1986 of Prime Minister Olaf Palme (who had been an occasional jazz reviewer) and the rumored missing manuscript of Stieg Larsson’s fourth novel; at the time of his premature death Larsson was one of the world’s most famous thriller writers for his Millennium trilogy featuring an impressively resourceful young tattooed woman (who has a small, hilarious cameo in this novel), and the manuscript would be invaluable. With the help of an idiosyncratic cop, Ulrika, the author ties the disparate mysteries together most agreeably. Readers will hope to find the attractive fiftyish Juliet embroiled in another jazz mystery sometime soon.…..Jazz is everywhere in this expansive, researched novel but never obtrusive. Real and fictitious musicians, many of them Scandinavian, are frequently cited, and one, Holiday Perkins, is brought to glorious life. A piano virtuoso, Perkins is one of the few remaining greats from the Golden Age of jazz, and his story has never been told. If we’re lucky, he may be the subject of Juliet’s next major work. Another musician, Bunny’s lover, comes under suspicion when it’s discovered he was Chet Baker’s bassist in Bologna when someone in their set was killed in the same manner as Henrik. And the club where Bunny’s group performs is affectionately described, as is the music they perform there:
The group was terrific. They played with an effervescent swing, a delicious engine that lifted the song on wings. That light, cool swing, infused with an abundance of minor notes from Holiday, was the essential ScandiJazz sound.
…..It would have been nice to learn more about Bunny’s tutelage under the renowned teacher-singer Jackie Paris, but oh well. . .
It would have been nice to learn more about Bunny’s tutelage under the renowned teacher-singer Jackie Paris, but oh well. . .
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Click here to read previous editions of excerpts from David J. Rife’s Jazz Fiction: Take Two
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Click here to read “Bluesette,” Salvatore Difalco’s winning story in the 67th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
Click here to read more short fiction published on Jerry Jazz Musician
Click here to read The Sunday Poem
Click here for information about how to submit your poetry or short fiction
Click here for details about the upcoming 68th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
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