Jazz Hero

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN--Dorothy Baker--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

This first novel was inspired by the music but not by the life of Leon (Bix) Beiderbecke, a Davenport, Ia. boy who played the trumpet in Paul Whiteman's band, became one of the greatest of jazz musicians and died in 1931, leaving devotees of swing music to collect phonographic records of his art as reverently as art collectors gather the works of Old Masters. In Young Man with a Horn, the hero is called Rick Martin, and he is presented as a good-natured, hardworking, colorless individual, an orphan who learns to play the piano in a Los Angeles mission, shifts to the trumpet under the influence of some first-class Negro musicians, and makes his first success while playing with a group of college boys at a California summer resort. Aside from his music, there is almost no story to his life: he marries a rich girl but she soon leaves him, and readers are given only cloudy pictures of their domestic life; he drinks himself into a sanatorium, but the reasons are barely suggested.

As Author Baker frankly confesses, her job is too much for her. The music that Rick Martin made died with him; it was improvised, unwritten, spontaneous and "one of these days even his records will be played out." To approximate that music in prose, she gives accounts of where and when it was played and how Rick Martin fell when he played it--but since what he felt was principally a moment of inspiration and self-forgetfulness, her accounts might apply as well to bad jazz as to good. Young Man with a Horn sounds right when Author Baker writes about the hard, homely details of musicians' lives, the routine of rehearsals, fights, salaries, jealousies, weariness, interrupted with moments of feverish musical excitement. It comes out strong when she describes the naive snobbery of Jack Stuart's Collegians, with its clean-cut young leader artfully squelching better musicians than himself. Why Author Baker wrote a trimmed-up novel instead of a straight biography of Bix Beiderbecke is a question Young Man with a Horn raises but does not answer.

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