1929

Rating:
Summary: As magical as the music it describes
Review: Someone once told me that it is impossible to adequately describe jazz music. He obviously hadn't read Fred Turner's book on Bix Beiderbecke. Part culture history, part semi-fictional biography of Bix, and always an artful celebration of that most-American of musical forms, this book is a masterpiece waiting to be discovered.

Why isn't this book a New York Times best seller?

Perhaps if you read this book you can explain this mystery to me. And if you read it, I guarantee that you are in for one of the best reads of your life.

Rating:
Summary: Capturing a rich period in American music history
Review: This novel based on the life of self-taught jazz pianist Bix Beiderbecke focuses on his career highlights and the evolution of the 1920s jazz scene, capturing a rich period in American music history by using the actual characters of the times and embellishing their stories. The result is a novel all the more compelling for its foundations in truth.

Rating:
Summary: An ambitious undertaking...
Review: Turner's writings on jazz certainly qualify him to write such a book. Like others in this genre of historical fiction, he endeavors to blend historical figures with fictional ones through whose eyes we witness events that are part of the lore of the Bix Beiderbecke and Capone sagas.

I'm not sure what level of interest the narrative will hold for readers unfamiliar with Beiderbecke. I raise the question; I'm not making a judgment so don't let an absence of knowledge about Bix Beiderbecke make you retreat. However, I would characterize things this way: The conventional plot associated with the fictional historical witnesses seems to me to be secondary to the larger character study that tries to get us inside Bix's skin. General readers may find the book "compelling" rather than a "I-couldn't-put-it-down." To the extent that this book may have the most appeal for those who know at least something of the Bix Beiderbecke's story, this is also, ironically, the community that may most bristle at it. They may also embrace it for raising the profile of one of their most closely-held heroes. I hope so; I think Turner has set out to do what he has artfully.

Although I'm sure it wasn't feasible, one might wish that such a book could be accompanied by a CD that would allow general readers to hear for themselves that the claims made so eloquently for Bix's horn in Turner's book are, in fact, no fiction at all.

So, let me urge any of you who decide to read this book and have no prior introduction to Bix Beiderbecke, that you order at least one Bix collection to make your reading of the book a more complete experience.