Excerpts from David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: Take Two – Vol. 15: High Spirits-Dark Laughter-Absurdity

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 of high spirits, dark laughter, and absurdity!

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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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High Spirits-Dark Laughter-Absurdity

…..The black humor that flourished in the 1960s in the works of such writers as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., J. P. Donleavy, and Bruce Jay Friedman can surely be found in several jazz-inflected narratives in the period under consideration: 2000-2022.

…….. Take, for example, Paul Beatty’s Slumberland, a hip, digressive “novel” featuring a charismatic DJ (“DJ Darky”) in 1980s LA who has developed a beat that flirts (in his mind at least) with perfection. He thinks he will be able to fulfill his dream if he can only find the right musician to solo over the nearly perfect rhythm: then, he and his followers will realize transcendence. He knows of such a musician and has heard rumors that he escaped behind the Iron Curtain a quarter century ago but hasn’t been heard from since. That flimsy hope is all it takes to send DJ to Germany where he hangs out—and holds court—at Slumberland, a saloon in West Berlin that caters to Black ex-pats. He’s like a stand-up comedian as he muses, reflects, and pontificates on a variety of hot button subjects, like the Cold War, jazz, race, and sex, always in highly charged, outrageous, and often hilarious language. His performances feel like spirited free jazz solos—and like that genre they don’t always disclose their structures or intentions. As DJ entangles himself in the volatile life of the city, he does pick up clues that eventually lead him to the mysterious avant-garde saxophonist on whom he has pinned his hopes.

……Marty Khan’s novella “I Never Lived Until I Died for You” also spotlights a twisted protagonist who goes on a journey in search of an elusive quarry, only Teddy’s quarry is a guy on the lam and the journey is into the future. Teddy’s a private eye who frequently holds court at the notorious jazz club Slugs, where in the real-world trumpeter Lee Morgan had his last performance before being shot dead by his irate woman. The story is a parody—or pastiche—of the hardboiled private eye stories of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and at first glance Teddy could be mistaken for Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, low-brimmed fedora and all. But when a knockout lady-in-distress (a Black version of Brigid O’Shaughnessy) enlists him to find her errant musician brother, Tate, we find, through descriptions of Teddy’s lust, that he’s actually a she in drag (and a lesbian, at that). So Teddy trails his client’s brother through a secret panel (a looking glass?) in a restroom that leads to the roof of Slugs 25 years in the future—a time-frame that shocks and repulses Teddy. Fortunately, after she apprehends her prey she is able to return to the good old days when bebop was king. Many readers will dream of returning to the same time and place when they hear Bobby Timmons getting it on at the end.

……Steve Lafter’s Bughouse has a similar jazz club ambiance and takes places as swing is making way for bebop. Jimmy Watts and his talented sidemen are the talk of the jazz cognoscenti. The clubs they play are packed and the enthusiasm of their audiences is electric. We learn of the private lives of the players: their love affairs, their challenges, and always booze and drugs (“bug juice”)—the standard furniture of the jazz life. We also learn, from the cover forward, that Jimmy and his confreres are insects, and well drawn indeed they are. In short, this is a graphic novel whose characters are insects who behave like their human counterparts. As in Kafka’s classic “Metamorphosis,” the realistic style conditions the reader to translate surreal events into human perspective. The story is a fine (and probably only} example of “Bug Noir.”

……Lance Took’s Between the Devil and Miles Davis is another graphic novel but its characters (both of them) are recognizably human. “Humanoid” may be more accurate. The story has political bite, but its bite has been blunted by time: it’s set in 2006 during the Bush regime. Its ultra-hip, bi-racial, and bi-sexual on-the-scene “heroine,” Amo Tanzer, wears a halter top with a prominent, embossed “Halliburton Plantation” logo and has decorated her office with an outsize photo of Jeb Bush to remind her, every day, of the horrors that threaten humankind’s future. Amo is stressed because she’s fallen behind schedule for a book she’s been commissioned to write on Miles Davis. We commiserate: Where could a new angle or revelation be hiding after all these years? After Amo escapes from a taxi accident, she finds a smoking-friendly bar with an attentive bartender. In fact, Narce, the only other presence in the story, is a wise, empathetic soul sister who may or may not exist. In any case, her long, boozy conversation peppered with references to Miles Davis, helps assuage Amo’s anxiety. This short Afrocentric entry is suffused with political, racial, and sexual content.

…..By far the most ambitious and substantive graphic jazz novel I’ve encountered is Dave Chisholm’s Instrumental. The protagonist, Tom Snyder, is a gifted trumpeter and serious composer whose musical career has gone stale through overexposure to identical gigs and unchanging bandmates. Tom wants to “break through” — establish a legacy — but realizes he will have to elevate his skill set in order to do so. Enter a Mysterious Stranger — out of nowhere, as it were — who presents Tom with an antiquated trumpet with magical powers, and with no strings attached. Everyone knows that that phrase is code for “Watch your ass.” But after whipping his new horn into playing shape, Tom starts blowing audiences away and getting offers to perform at plummy venues. Not long after, however, death and disorder begin to surround Tom wherever he plays, leading him to realize that the enchanted instrument he had thought would lead him to the holy land of Truth and Transcendence is in reality “the trumpet of doom.” But Tom is luckier than most characters caught in such a quandary: Just as he is about to give in to despair, Tom gets a second chance. He encounters two wise men who provide him with a blueprint for artistic fulfillment. Both a Mozart impersonator and the real John Coltrane counsel Tom that the road to salvation is to continue to pursue Truth through his art. This graphic novel comes with a CD whose seven tracks are designed to highlight certain features of the chapters they correspond to.

……Dorian Mode’s A Café in Venice is equally “far out,” but in a different way: It takes place 10,000 miles from Amo’s Manhattan, in two disparate locations in Australia. In the first half of this novel which is as long as the two previous entries are short, the nitwitty protagonist, Gordon Shoesmith, tootles around Sydney delivering pizzas in a clown suit while fantasizing about becoming the talk of the jazz community in New York as a scat singer-jazz composer. Against logic, Gordon has an ambitious, sympathetic, beautiful girlfriend. What could go wrong? The answer is, since Gordon is a neurotic klutz, everything. When we next see him, he’s no longer employed and has severed his romantic relationship to work in the Australian outback at a place called Venice, an absurd name for an absurd café in the middle of the desert. But he still entertains the fantasy of artistic fulfillment. Gordon goes to work for a fat Palestinian émigré named Joe who wears a white jumpsuit and pursues his dream of achieving celebrity as an Elvis impersonator. Clown masks are redundant for characters like these. It’s also redundant to mention that these guys meet up with some equally dizzy specimens and get into a string of farcical escapades. For a few extra bucks you can acquire a CD that was designed to accompany the novel. It comprises the jazz compositions of Gordon Shoesmith/Dorian Mode; Mode is the pseudonym of a famous Australian musician—or so we’re informed.

…..We’re back in Manhattan in Jonathan L. Segal’s The Disharmonic Misadventures of David Stein with a titular character who is, in the spirit of this high-spirited category, a (mostly) endearing klutz. Stein plays jazz piano and sings and gets along OK, but as he approaches middle age, he frets over the prospect of continuing to muddle through life without direction or accomplishment. Then one day he is transfixed by a snatch of music he hears while walking down the street. He determines at that moment to track down the tune’s provenance; it has touched him so deeply that he is willing to devote his life to finding out its origin and meaning. His quest of this enigmatic objective—like the Holy Grail or Maltese Falcon—involves him in a series of phantasmagorical (mis)adventures that lead him not only to a deeper knowledge of himself but also to an utterly new musical system, the “Gabriel Scale,” which allows the musician, for example, to convert “Autumn Leaves” into “Forest Fire in the Fall.” In other words, by changing tones and substituting chords, the player can expand the possibilities of musical expression. John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” may spring to some readers’ minds.

……Another freewheeling story set in New York with a goofily charming anti-hero is Scott Schacter’s Outside In. Like David Stein, sax man Shawn Lewis must overcome a series of obstacles in order to achieve his objective—the hand of a fairy princess. Shawn is the victim of his own outsized but decidedly uncommercial talent. His free jazz forays make his colleagues question the integrity of his instrument, exasperate his audiences, and lead his medically astute sweetheart—his fairy princess—to question his mental stability. But just as his situation seems hopeless, Shawn is hired to play his far-out music to an incurable schizophrenic whose own ungovernable paintings provide a pictorial counterpart to Shawn’s “interworld bebop.” Here and elsewhere in this rambling book, the age-old question of the relationship between genius and insanity is evoked. With his charge’s encouragement, Shawn takes his music to the streets and builds enough of a following to become—in fairytale time—a cult figure before, inevitably, being committed to a psychiatric ward, where he has the good fortune to be visited by the spirits of such colossal saxophone geniuses as Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. Through their guidance, he can produce music so fresh and pure as to connect him to the Other World and recover the favor of his lady love.

……Steven Boykey Sidley’s Meyer, from Imperfect Solo: A Dark Comedy of Random Misfortune, is another jazz saxophonist who lives on the edge, typically the edge of misfortune. The opening sentence–“I am filled with dread”—places him in the same gene pool with David Stein and Shawn Lewis, not to mention their more “literary” cousins like Saul Bellow’s Charlie Citrine and Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, to name just two of several impaired males. They are all middle-class urban Jews with messy pasts, challenging presents, and problematic futures. Meyer ‘s life is littered with huge judgmental missteps revolving around neglected parents and children, ex-wives, current girlfriends, and the disconcerting prospect of a chaotic middle age. Adolescent thinking interferes with the intellectual capacity (and common sense) of Meyer and his like. Meyer’s a software engineer but lives to play his ax with his band. He affiliates himself with those artists who play their hearts out even when no one’s listening. He longs for the day that he knows will never come: the day when Michael Brecker will approach him after a solo and say, “Damn, that was pretty.” If his first 40 or so years are any indication, Meyer’s life will continue rambling along accompanied by “imperfect solos,” “random misfortunes,” and rollicking misadventures until it can’t ramble anymore.

…..There are misfortunes aplenty in C. J. Levesque’s The World Famous Franky Fritz Band, too, but the plucky title character perseveres with the help of a rare commodity in jazz (and most other) fiction: a functional family. Shortly after WWII, young Franky, a war veteran, is abandoned at the altar, leaving him with a sharp tuxedo, his beloved Conn Wonder cornet, a powerful yearning to succeed as a musician and band leader, and — a year later — a beautiful baby daughter he didn’t know he had fathered. Undeterred, Franky moves in the direction of his dreams and builds a solid band that is counterintuitive for its time. Franky insists on playing old timey New Orleans jazz just as big band swing is sweeping the land. Franky’s hopes and success are bolstered with the hiring of a magnetic female to sing in the band. Franky doesn’t know how lucky he is. Not only does her appealing personality enrich the chemistry of the band (and thus of course the music) but she makes herself gladly available as surrogate mother to Franky’s daughter Ariel. But then, just as everyone seems to be settling into a mellow groove, rock and roll comes storming into town, almost instantly stealing away the audiences that had supported the several varieties of jazz. As if that wasn’t dispiriting enough for Franky and company, then his daughter runs away with — hold your breath, dear reader — a rocker! But thanks to Bobbi’s straight thinking and bottomless generosity of spirit, everything is sorted out at the end as we wait eagerly for a double wedding with Franky’s idol Bix Beiderbecke smiling down on them from Jazz Hall of Fame heaven.

……Stona Fitch’s Give + Take is another romantic comedy that will leave the reader smiling and hoping to see it adapted by Hollywood. Ross Clifton is a much in-demand itinerant jazz pianist whose posh gigs position him to rip off his rich patrons. During performances, Ross scouts out the audience in search of the most attractive woman with the largest diamonds. He’ll then, after the show, inveigle her to seduce him so he can separate her from her jewelry. But Ross isn’t an ordinary con man or jewel thief: He’s the Robin Hood of jazz pianists. He takes from the well-heeled and gives to the needy. Two things occur to disrupt his cushy but increasingly stale lifestyle. His teenage nephew arrives, causing Ross to become a surrogate father for a while—a situation designed to create discomfort in a man with a laid-back lifestyle. But then a luscious, gifted jazz singer comes into his life; she seems to complete him when she reveals that she’s his doppelgänger: she uses her voluptuous body and sexy presentation to bewitch horny old rich men into unwittingly sharing their wealth, which she in turn puts to humane use. I’m looking for George Clooney and Jessica Chastain to play the leads when I produce the movie.

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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 “My Vertical Landscape,” Felicia A. Rivers’ winning story in the 69th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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