Hot v. Sweet

PIANO IN THE BAND -- Dale Curran -- Reynal & Hifchcock ($2).

Young Man With a Horn, by Dorothy Baker (TIME, June 6, 1938), was inspired by the life & work of the immeasurably talented Bix Beiderbecke. Readers raved over the novel; jazz musicians held it in thorough contempt.* Piano in the Band is like a roomful of rank amateurs through whose affectionate bloobs and bleatings may be heard, if faintly and scratchily, the record they are trying to duplicate: Tin Roof Blues. Whether readers can rave over it is doubtful. What musicians will think of the novel -- since they are kind to the nonpretentious -- is uncertain. But faulty as it is, it is warmly readable.

George Baker plays the piano in a fading but still powerful commercial band. Baker and several of his colleagues play a better music (hot jazz) than their boss will allow them, but they have their living to make. When Leader Walters takes on a marijuana-shattered former employe named Frenchy Beausea for the sake of Frenchy's metallic wife, whom he svengalizes into a smash singer, the whole band ripens for trouble. It bursts, at length, in a riverfront dive in St. Louis. At the end of it George Baker has realized his own powers and is free at last to use them: but whether he can, after years of creative suicide, the Walters hypnosis, the fertility of opposition, he is not quite sure.

Dale Curran's descriptions of theatrical and ballroom jazz are excellent. Because he likes true jazz so well, he is not one-tenth so good at telling about it. He avoids, to be sure, those indulgences in technological slang with which customers embarrass the second trumpeter. But he does let Jeff Walters say what Jeff Walters could never have said: "The world needs beauty."

*Of the heart interest introduced by the author, Guitarist Eddie Condon grated: "Bix never washed his feet."

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