Hot Jazz Reportage

SEND ME DOWN--Henry Steig--Knopf ($2.50).

A first novel by the brother of New Yorker Artist William Steig is the best story so far about hot jazz and the people who make it. Dorothy Baker's Young Man With a Horn showed tinny enthusiasm, a specious literary talent; Dale Curran's Piano in the 'Band had a warmer enthusiasm, less talent. But even Send Me Down leaves a long way to go. Its author has had some actual experience as a jazz musician, has knowledge and taste about the music, can do good reportage on the professional and erotic life of his colleagues. Beyond that he does not venture.

Clarinetist Pete Davis ' moves out of Manhattan's 46th Street into a series of low-grade dates in Pennsylvania in the early '20s, winds up with a topflight, ill-paid hot outfit in Chicago. His pianist brother Frank sticks to the seaboard; his greater talent and his tameness betray him into the venal successes of the "swing" rage. Between the two of them they cover most of the salient features of jazz and Jazz-living among white musicians. There is some sore stuff on that corrupt necessity, the musician's union, and an interesting passage about marijuana. Send Me Down, in its own scale, is a likable enough performance. But it is scarcely adequate to its subject.

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