Rick Martin grows up in Los Angeles without making much of an impression on anyone. He receives little attention from his guardians and has no interest in school. He’s quiet, self-contained and unambitious. Then at fourteen Rick becomes interested in music and teaches himself to play the piano. While working in a pool hall, he meets Smoke Jordan, four years older and hoping for a career as a drummer. Despite differences in race -- Rick is white and Smoke is black -- the two become friends. Outside a South Central nightclub they hang out listening to jazz pianist Jeff Williams and his band. Rick soon switches to the trumpet, and his talent blossoms into self-expression.
Readers will have no trouble getting a handle on this book. Baker’s chatty narrator summarizes the entire story in a brief prologue. The author wants to emphasize not what happens but how it happens. The prologue also lays out themes: “the gap between [Rick’s] musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life; . . . the difference between the demands of expression and the demands of life here below; . . . the difference between good and bad in a native American art form -- jazz music.” (p. 3 of the 1946 edition) It’s true that the book is known as the first novel to focus on jazz and as a fictional account of Bix Beiderbecke’s short career in the 1920s. But it’s also a meditation on race. Rick is one of the few white protagonists in American fiction essentially raised by African Americans. They are his friends, his mentors and eventually the only people who care about him. They are so central to the story, in fact, that the book is nearly half over before Rick leaves South Central. The racial theme, which garnered little comment when the novel was originally published, may add to its appeal today.
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