Excerpts from David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: Take Two – Vol. 13: Child Prodigies

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.

In this edition, Rife writes about stories whose theme is child prodigies

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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 21^st 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.

-David J. Rife

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The pianist Joey Alexander pictured on the cover of his 2018 Motema CD Eclipse, recorded at the age of 15. It was his fourth album as a leader.

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…..WhWhenever terms like “child prodigy” or wunderkind are bandied about, names like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Picasso, and Norbert Wiener soon fill the air. All performed at some artistic or intellectual endeavor at the level of a professional before they were ten. Jazz has produced an impressive number of such gifted children. A very short list might include the names of Bud Powell, who could pick out a tune on the piano before he was five; Hazel Scott, who was accepted at Juilliard at eight; Nina Simone, who could identify musical notes on paper by six months and play complete songs by three, and Indonesian piano whiz Joey Alexander who won the Grand Prix at a Master Jam-Fest when he was nine. The following list offers fictional counterparts of these musical phenoms.

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…..This is a dramatic monologue delivered by the title character’s best friend Tim Tooney who relates the fabulous story of the world’s greatest jazz pianist. Danny Boodmann T. D. Lemon Novecento was born on the ocean liner The Virginian of unknown parentage in 1900 (hence “Novecento”) and remained on board until his death during WW2. At an early age, Novecento taught himself to play piano, soon mastering notes and combinations no one had ever heard before. The band took great pleasure in performing several times each day, and they played

because the Ocean is big, and frightening, we played so that people wouldn’t feel time passing, and would forget where they were and who they were. We played to make them dance, because if you’re dancing you can’t die, and you feel like God. And we played ragtime, because it’s the music God dances to, when no one’s looking . . . That God would dance to if only he were a Negro.

…..In 1931, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, came aboard to see the wondrous musician everyone was raving about and soon forced Novecento into a cutting contest. Morton played music that was “absolute magic,” but of course (in the manner of such fables) Novecento blows him away into deep humiliation. The scenes of this musical competition are almost as thrilling as the music they describe. This brief book was written as a play and has in fact been performed; it was also made into a movie with Tim Roth, The Legend of 1900 (1998). Whatever its elusive genre classification, it’s a delightfully imaginative riff on jazz.

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…..Madeleine Altimari is a charmingly incorrigible potty-mouthed nine-year-old who has recently lost her showgirl mother. After being rejected by her classmates and expelled from school on the day of the story—Christmas Eve eve—Madeleine determines to make her way on foot across town, in the snow, to the legendary Philadelphia jazz club The Cat’s Pajama’s where she will make her stage debut—or bust. She does find the club, against serious odds and obstacles, at 2 a.m. and, in fairy tale fashion, realizes her dream of singing jazz, like her idol Blossom Dearie: “She sparkles, she goddamns, when it’s time for the highest note, she gathers the reins of her diaphragm and soars. Even the musicians doff their impassive expressions.”

…..The novel contains a couple other jazz scenes and quite a few references to musicians, but the primary focus is on the young girl’s heroic trek across an unglamorous big city and two related subplots.

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…..The lives of two girls of mixed ethnicity and broken families intersect when Mahsa leaves Karachi to attend college in Montreal, where Katherine is struggling to make her way as a jazz musician. Both young women are pianistic prodigies whose sensibilities and skills distinguish them from their peers and bring them lovingly together. Their absorption in music allows them to triumph over the daunting challenges of war, civil strife, sexism, and their own problematic choices. The novel is saturated in the mechanics of music and in lives surrendered to jazz. Katherine recalls:

The first day of my real life was when I heard Dance of the Infidels . . . Down fell the needle into the groove on the turning black record with its yellow label. I was bouncing with Bud, and bouncing out of the end of my childhood. Nothing else would matter again. No one ever said passion is a good thing but when it happens there is no escaping. I started transcribing Bud Powell. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I got Harold to let me use an old beat-up record player in his office. I set it up in the basement as close as I could to the piano. Stopped and started. Dropped the needle down over and over looking for the spot. Writing the note. Listening again. Running to the piano and playing it to see if I got it right. It took me the whole summer and it was a happy summer.

…..Notable jazz musicians, including several Canadians, are mentioned along the way. Art Blakey, who had never hired a woman before, lets Katherine sit in with the Messengers, and Marion McPartland befriends her and arranges her first recording gig. Finally, the young women’s reflections on and dissections of specific jazz performances are richly provocative, as when Katherine listens twenty times in a row to Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and realizes she wasn’t “lonely with Coltrane and Tyner inside” her and that this kind of “music is what marriage could be, playing solos at the same time and ending up together.” This essential jazz novel contains ample rewards for the fan of jazz literature.

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…..Mira Alden is a 17-year-old jazz nerd and musical prodigy. She would rather practice her trumpet and compose avant-garde (neo-bebop) jazz in her head than take part in the sports and pop activities of her peers. Wherever she goes and whatever she does, she’s accompanied by the spirit of Miles Davis (as well as her beloved trumpet). She embraces his savoir faire—his “cool”—and his innovative mastery of his instrument. Because of her own precocious mastery, the music department of her high school has arranged a program highlighting her trio to play “the world premiere of the original jazz trio written by our very own Mira Alden . . . ‘Lou’s New York.’” Mira isn’t surprised by her classmates’ indifference to her presentation. After all, she and her music are out of step with the times. So she looks to summer break as a time to refine her skill sufficiently to gain admission to the world-renowned Fulton Jazz Conservatory in Harlem come fall. But, though it’s not advertised as such, this is a YA novel and its heroine is 17 and thus vulnerable to all the traps that lay in wait for the young. One of these is electronic music, which she had long rejected—on principle. But when a friend persuades her to attend a warehouse dance (a “rave”) and try her hand at DJing, she actually enjoys herself and discovers she has natural ability at manipulating the sound equipment. And she has her first romance—with an “older” man: he’s 21 to her 17. After losing her virginity and naivete (her guy isn’t who he had seemed), the resilient, much more mature Mira looks forward to the end of summer and recommencing her love of making and creating real music.

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.…..Thirteen-year-old Andre is an intellectual and musical prodigy who is a selective mute, that is, a person whose silence has a psychological rather than a physiological origin. Andre never goes anywhere without his trumpet: it’s his key to the happiness that creates happiness in others. This idea, conscious or otherwise, derives from his total devotion to his hero Louis Armstrong. Andre has read and absorbed everything he could find about the great musician. Both came from the same New Orleans neighborhood, experienced traumatic daddy issues, became waifs, and embraced music for solace. Andre is so preoccupied with Armstrong that he seems at times to become him. When he reflects about the relationship between music and life, the reader has to pause to figure out whether we’re in Andre’s or Armstrong’s mind. Andre’s beloved dad is shot dead in front of Andre early in the book, setting in motion an investigation of the crime to which Andre is the sole witness. As the investigation proceeds, we begin to suspect that there might be a connection between Andre’s speechlessness and his father’s death. The novel has a gratifying (if fantastical) ending, and if it has few descriptions of jazz in the making, it is nevertheless worth reading for its jazz content, especially the speculations about Armstrong’s musical philosophy.

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Click here to read previous editions of excerpts from David J. Rife’s Jazz Fiction: Take Two

Click here to read “Saharan Blues on the Seine,” Aishatu Ado’s winning story in the 68th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

Click here to read more short fiction published on Jerry Jazz Musician

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