Books: The Lost Beat

BLOW UP A STORM (337 pp.)—Garson Kanin—Random House ($3.95).

There is a school of thought which holds that bullfight bores are more deserving of ball-bat anesthesia than jazz bores, but this school is wrong. A bullfight bore may re-enact Manolete’s death spasms, but a jazz bore will replay the same Charlie Parker record, with contrapuntal commentary, until his woofer melts. The public ear has been grievously bent, and therefore any novel about jazzmen that is fresh, authentic and ungummed by cultism is an achievement.

Playwright Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman’s fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early ‘303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings pick up, and with the addition of two more saxophonists and a drummer, the outfit seems on the point of blowing itself a big name.

Marijuana Fudge. The old nostalgia is sometimes dangerously near burning down as Kanin writes of the antic hey-hey, but the mood is so pleasant and pervasive that the bemused reader is willing to forgive Author Kanin for taking a few choruses too many. The people are alive—the pretty French girl who collects jazz and jazzmen, the frazzlewit bass player who concocts a marijuana fudge.

But the fond, mellow mood eventually turns sour. Kanin. carefully foreshadowing, leads the reader toward what should be a shocker of an ending. The combo folded, the narrator recalls, after its thunderous Negro drummer died of too many pep pills and too much whisky. Slowly, 25 years later, the sax player is made aware of a horrifying truth: one of the white bandsmen, obsessed with race hatred, deliberately fed the ailing Negro the poison that would kill him.

Jazz Sermon. Somehow, the shock is not shocking. The evil act. which should dominate the book, is not made really believable. The last chapters of the novel have the faintly embarrassing tone of a sermon in jazz language attempted by an overearnest cleric. The tormented murderer asks: “Why is it that if we could all learn to play together the way we did—why is it we couldn’t learn to live together?” The narrator’s sanctimonious reply: “Woody, if we could—even between us—answer that simple question—seemingly simple—we could turn this into a hip world.” But the world remains sadly square, and in the highflying riff of moralizing, Old Jazzman Kanin has lost his novel’s beat.