Young Man with a Horn by Dorothy Baker

That's the story, and it could never be called a grand tragic theme; it does not depict the fall of a noble person from high to low estate--Rick Martin never got anywhere near high estate, though he did make a lot of money for a while.  But it is a story that has the ring of truth and an overtone or two.  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.  Because there's good in this music and there's bad.  There is music that is turned out sweet in hotel ballrooms and there is music that comes right out of the genuine urge and doesn't come from money.

Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is a fictionalized version of jazz giant Bix Beiderbecke, who, while largely forgotten among Americans today, was one of the first real virtuosos of the genre in its early days, and who died tragically and mysteriously young.  Her version of Beiderbecke is Rick Martin: a wayward kid from Los Angeles who discovers an aptitude for music by fooling around with a piano in an unlocked church, and who then finds there's no room for anything else in his life.  It's a story, at least in part, about race: like Beiderbecke, Rick is welcomed into the almost entirely black world of jazz music, and his talents and passion for the music are what are able to overcome the prejudices he's inherited.

Moreover, it's a story about the gifts and poisons of genius; Rick is the best trumpet player in the world because it is the only thing he's able to fit into his life.  Baker underscores this when, in an early scene, the teenage Rick hears that the drummer in the band he adores has suddenly died of a burst appendix.  Rick's best friend Smoke, a world-class drummer in his own right, is going to inherit the job, but while Smoke is wracked with grief, Rick can only think about the band:

"When you going to start?" Rick said.  He didn't have anything to say about death; the only thing he ever had anything to say about was music.  From his own point of view as a pianist and trumpet player he could tell you whether a piece was hard or easy; in a larger sense, as a critic, he could say right off whether a thing was good or bad.  His instinctive taste was infallible within the bounds of his chosen field.  Outside of that he was deaf, dumb, and blind, even slightly halt and more or less lame.  What was death to him; what was plane geometry; what was Spanish Conversation and Composition?  He looked steadily, with appraising eye, at the late George Ward's drums.

I was surprised how different Young Man with a Horn is from Cassandra at the Wedding, a book published almost 25 years later than Young Man, and which possesses a kind of mid-century modernist air that Baker apparently had yet to develop.  In place of Cassandra's third person limited POV, Young Man with a Horn is narrated by an unidentified and unnamed narrator whose account of Rick's life is steeped in vernacular and colloquialisms.  It seems right for the novel, and by the end, the novel itself becomes kind of jazzy, taken up with elaborate counterpoints between Rick, Smoke, bandleader Jeff Williams, and the other early jazz figures that make up Rick's world.  Even Rick's brief and ill-fated marriage to an ironic and aloof woman seems to take on the forms of great jazz improvisation.  At the same time, the narrator--and Baker--are cagey about the ability of the written word to capture the feeling or sensation of music, and while Baker writes lucidly and without repetitiveness about the experience of playing music, her reticence to reach for unsatisfying metaphors or florid language is one of the book's strengths.

Like Beiderbecke, Rick is doomed to die young, a fact that the narrator warns us of from the very outset of the book.  Beiderbecke's death is somewhat of a mystery, but Rick drinks himself to death.  Alternatively, Baker suggests that what really kills him is that love of jazz, a need to play music so powerful there's no room for anything else in Rick's life, even his life itself.  The climax comes when Rick, playing on a recording behind Smoke's sister Josephine (everyone in this L.A. neighborhood seems to grow up to become a jazz virtuoso) when, for the first time in his life, he plays a bum note.  The rumor is that Rick is washed up, that he's finally exhausted his talent, but the bandleader hears something different:

They waited a minute and Jeff went on almost as if he were talking to himself: "I don't know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do.  That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for--there isn't any such thing.  Not on a horn."

Rick dies because his dream has outstripped life; as the note he is imagining cannot be played, so the life he wants to live cannot be lived.  You can't live jazz and only jazz.  But jazz, as genteel and milquetoast as it seems today, strikes me as the only musical form, except for its cousin blues, that might ever have inspired anyone to believe such a thing.  No one seems to be under the impression that trap music might offer a transcendent existence, or house music, unless maybe those on molly.  Young Man with a Horn really gave me a sense of how special it was to be around jazz in those early days and what a loss it is that those days are gone.