Young Man with a Horn
Author(s): Baker Dorothy
Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it courses with the verve and swing of the music that defined an era. From the beginning, Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the boss at the Cotton Club that he was underage or to the folks in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out with nothing in the slums of LA, but there was a kind of fate to his ending up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But where instinct and drive are all you need to take you far in music, they aren't enough to make a life work. Baker took her inspiration for Young Man with a Horn from the tragic life of Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
General Information
- :
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : 0.218
- : 01 October 2012
- : United States
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Baker Dorothy
- : P
- : 912
- : English
- : 813.52
- : 192
More About The Product
""Young Man with a Horn" is a great book, beautifully conceived and masterfully written. There is little else that can be said in praise of any book." - "New York Amsterdam News"
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""The Young Man with a Horn "is the story of a musician, a swing trumpeter who lives only for the pounding rhythms in his blood. Yet despite its subject matter, it is not the fragment of fervid impressionism that the jazz age used to produce; despite the irrationalism of swing, the book itself is a clear-minded, informed, coldly rational study of a swing-addict." -"The New York Times
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""Young Man with a Horn" is practically perfect. You feel, and feel deeply, the atmosphere Baker describes, the music Rick and his friends make, the fanatic devotion of artists who can't take their music or leave it but must take it and take it hard. Between the lines Baker somehow gets a great many true things said about American life, its tempo, its elements of frustration, its unique and unquestioning vitality." --Clifton Fadiman, "The New Yorker"
"I first read this book when I was twelve. I loved it because it did not condescend or sugarcoat. It took me inside the music--it made me want to find an instrument and learn it." --Jesse Kornbluth
DOROTHY DODDS BAKER (1907-1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, and raised in California. After having a few short stories published, Baker turned to writing full-time, and in 1938 she published Young Man with a Horn, which earned critical praise and eventually became a movie. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times. Her final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding, is also available from NYFRB Classics. GARY GIDDINS was a music critic for The Village Voice, where his column Weather Bird ran for thirty years. He has contributed articles about music, mostly jazz, to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation and Vanity Fair, among others.
