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Lädt ... Night Songvon John A. Williams
   Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  HectorSwell | Jun 10, 2024 |  keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Inspired by the life of Charlie "Bird" Parker, this poignant, provocative, and stylistically brilliant tale paints a vivid picture of the New York City jazz scene In Greenwich Village, jazz is king, enticing hip young crowds with its seductive and vibrant rhythms. Jazz is also the lifeblood pumping through the veins of Richie "Eagle" Stokes, a saxophonist blessed with an otherworldly talent but cursed by cravings for women, fame, and heroin. To ex-college professor David Hillary, musicians like Stokes are gods possessed with the uncanny ability to turn a private inner world inside out and make everything else irrelevant. And for ex-preacher Keel Robinson, Hillary's unlikely savior, the bewitching music serves as a bridge across racial boundaries as he embarks on a forbidden and dangerous love affair. Considered one of the finest novelists of a generation that included James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, author John A. Williams follows a diverse cast of all-too-human characters through nighttime New York City in this incendiary and unforgettable novel. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (4)
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Night Song is a compact, keen-edged story of jazz and the people who live it. Ex-professor and recovering alcoholic finds temporary respite in the employ of a former preacher at the Greenwich Village café/flophouse that serves as a gathering place for local musicians. Williams’ skillful evocation of time and place takes us downtown in the late 1950s, where musical fate is fickle. Some soar, and some fall. (There are stand-ins for Charlie Parker and Miles Davis to help make the point). Race is a theme both hopeful and mournful, as it must be in the hands of a mid 20th-c. black American writer.
Night Song was published in 1961, six years after Charlie Parker’s death and a year before Robert Reisner’s oral history Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker. Williams models the musician Richie “Eagle” Stokes on Parker, and has the former preacher and café-proprietor Keel give us the early, eternal take on the meaning of Charlie Parker:
Some people preserve statues and old drawings on cave walls, but we have to have Eagle. He’s us. He’s fire and brain; he’s stubborn and shabby; proud and without pride; kind and evil. His music is our record: blues, why goddammit, his best music always came from blues. Isn’t that terribly like all of us? Building on the blues, building with such speed and intricacy that we don’t enough know it’s blues right on? We don’t understand it, but we have short patience with cats who try to imitate him. Eagle is our aggressiveness, our sickness, our self-hate, but also our will to live in spite of everything. He symbolizes the rebel in us.