Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Young Man with a Horn
Author: Dorothy Baker, Gary Giddins - afterword
Narrator: Kevin T. Collins
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-08-15
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
Rick Martin loved music, and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life.
Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry - though not the life - of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
Members Reviews:
Dorothy Baker manages to do with words what her fictional ...
Dorothy Baker manages to do with words what her fictional character Rick Martin does with a trumpet. The very writing itself is evocative of jazz. The plot is minimal and there are no surprises; the Prologue lays it all out beforehand. But this book makes you feel the way musicians must feel about the music they play, and that's quite a feat.
Like reading ice chips
The story is so sparsely written, it reminds us of how subtlety used to be an art form. Written in 1938, by Dorothy Baker inspired by the life of Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz cornetist, the story is gripping from start to finish. How art and the total control it takes of a person leads to the end.
A marked man
In this fictional biography of a brilliant young musician, modeled on the tragic jazz pianist/trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, one of the secondary characters refers to the protagonist, Rick Martin, as a marked man. Marked by genius but also marked for tragedy. Suggests that the geniuses of the world are all obliged to pay for their gifts in some painful way.
Author Dorothy Baker doesn't speculate about her lead character's demise--and not a word about Bix Beiderbecke's fate. But somehow her beautifully laid out saga of Rick Martin's life, which takes him from a lonely and unpromising childhood in the early 1900s to success after success in the years that follow seems to be leading to a mighty fall. Along the way, the reader learns a lot about jazz, the life of musicians, and most especially about race relations in the first part of the 20th Century.
The novel is full of wonderful characters and some of the clearest and most enjoyable prose anywhere. A great read that will make you want to try other books by this author.
Over the years, I've read this novel a dozen times
See if this grabs you: "What I'm going to do now is to write off the story of Rick Martin's life, now that it's over, now that Rick is washed up and gone, as they say, to his rest." That's the first line. It's a story about genius and glory and doom, about a boy who taught himself how to play piano and trumpet and was, at 20, bound for glory, and well before his 30th birthday, was dead.
The great novel of the 1920s is The Great Gatsby. A `20s story that's almost as good is this one --- the fictionalized story of Leon Bismarck "Bix" Beiderbecke (1903 - 1931), who rocketed out of Davenport, Iowa with a sound so distinctive his only competition was Louis Armstrong.
