Not just a pitiable waste of luminous talent, but a really scary story. Narrated by Gavin with gingery discernment. (24 pp....
The grim life of cool jazzman Baker, told with relish and a firm grasp of the material by Gavin (Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret, 1991).
Baker epitomized detached hipness: he was handsome and dangerous, above it all, a natural lyrical trumpeter with a bell-clear tenor, and a true bad boy. As bebop was making its presence felt, with all its dissonant chords and chromatic solos and unusual rhythms, its improvisation and intimidation, Baker started making his name as a horn player, but in a more fluid style, running from brash and spirited to playing that was “as graceful as poems.” Gavin tells Baker’s story with excitement, a torrent of images and associations on a par with the trumpeter’s own far-flung ramble through the jazz world, working with Charlie Parker (whose praise rocketed him to stardom), his extraordinary early musical rapport with Gerry Mulligan, and his own low-key West Coast groups. But, as Gavin explains, he was also one troubled man, mistrusting, needing to be mothered, vulgar, reckless, and irresponsible. Derided by East Coast critics for his mildness and accused by black jazz players of lifting their material and commercializing it, Baker still had a tremendous following, though Gavin allows that it was as much for his looks as for his pearly trumpeting and androgynous voice. Dope took him down. Grass gave way to painkillers, then heroin, and Baker turned himself into a walking ghost. Gavin does a cringingly fine job of detailing these personal travails, Baker’s desperate womanizing, and his musical persona, which made nickel-and-dime clubs feel as natural for Baker as the big jazz festivals, or more so. Yet, doped and pathetic, even his last European gigs were found to have a “broken, lonely, but at the same time endlessly sweet and emotional sound.”
Not just a pitiable waste of luminous talent, but a really scary story. Narrated by Gavin with gingery discernment. (24 pp. photographs)Pub Date: May 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44287-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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