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El Chico De La Trompeta (1938)

by Dorothy Baker(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 4

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English

genre

Fiction

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Contraseña

review 1: This book suffers from being being a first - a first novel about jazz musicians, a first about amicable, equal relations between whites and blacks (although there are echoes of Finn and N. Jim here), a first about a white protagonist learning about jazz from black mentors - and therefore fails to portray these things in a manner that we might now consider sophisticated. But there are some great scenes here, and most importantly Baker's love of Dixieland jazz is contagious. The book lets us here Bix Biederbecke and the like with new ears, without the overlay of phony, reactionary nostalgia, as a thrilling new art.
review 2: I’ve always been a big fan of the 1950 film “Young Man with a Horn,” the jazz melodrama starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Do... moreris Day (along with the behind-the-scenes, heavily-vibratoed trumpet of Harry James). It’s an evocative, solid period entertainment with excellent music, but there’s nothing to suggest that it has a literary source or narrative underpinnings of any serious ambition. Only the performance of Hoagy Carmichael as the narrator and oracular piano player Smoke embodies a truly authentic world-weariness. I was surprised to see the original novel in a New York Review of Books reissue. Or more precisely, to see that it was based on a novel at all. Dorothy Baker’s 1938 book is strikingly different from the film; it is raw and tersely unsentimental, with a powerful streak of social commentary and an impressive command of jazz history and musical technique. And Carmichael’s Smoke is neither narrator nor piano-playing mentor, but a young African-American drummer. The film’s key conflicts (such as the dueling Doris Day and Lauren Bacall good- and bad-girl love interests) are gone, as are its endearingly histrionic peaks and valleys. The novel’s main concerns are musical; all the appealing characteristics of jazz that make it partially into the screen version (its outlaw vitality, its lack of commercial promise, its punishing grind for working musicians) live in Baker’s prose.The story is straightforward. In the early 30s, white high school musician Rick Baker befriends a group of African-American musicians in his central Los Angeles neighborhood and obsessively develops his craft in piano and trumpet, leading to fame and financial success with a white big band, as well as an eccentric and perfunctory society marriage. His compulsion for musical integrity eventually turns to sacrifice; Baker abandons jazz’s more commercial trappings for the life of an eccentric, rootless outsider.“Young Man with a Horn” is a relatively short novel that often feels deliberately compressed. The character of Rick Baker emerges less from organic scene setting than from the lyrical, precise voice of the narrator herself; Baker’s style is profoundly rhetorical and omniscient, and is so densely expository that it often feels like the summary of a larger work. Dialogue is minimal, but brilliantly tough and authentic where it appears. That sense of gritty realism, along with its sensitive and impressively detailed accounts of jazz performance, are ultimately where its appeal lies. less

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