Details
Synopsis
A young bass player from Alabama is hired to tour with a legendary jazz band from Harlem to Hollywood, retracing the routes of the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration and the Gold Rush, among others. With "Train Whistle Guitar" and "The Spyglass Tree" this book forms a trilogy about the maturation of a young black man in the first half of the 20th century.
| Size | | Length: | 369 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "When road buses used to go west by way of Memphis and Little Rock in those days you picked up Route 66 on the other side of Oklahoma City."
Industry Reviews
"Murray provides a revealing analysis of the aesthetics of the music, at once structured and improvisational, played by the Bossman's orchestra, and of the interaction of the Bossman with the band's instrumental craftsmen. This is challenging stuff for a novelist to convey, and Murray does it with aplomb."
Washington Post Book World - Charles Monaghan (02/04/1996)
"Murray's novel is a work of joy, of celebration, of looking back to a time of grand invention. It's a work that declares the freedom that this great music signified for those who, in so many other ways and for so long, were not free at all."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - John Gregory Brown (03/17/1996)
"In these days of intensified racial consciousness and multiculturalism, Mr. Murray's universalist message seems almost naive, unknowing, unhip. But that would be a false impression. He is, as he puts it in one of Scooter's reflections on Frederick Douglass, simply unwilling to compromise 'the human proposition underlying the American promise' by yielding to racial defensiveness, cutting himself off from any aspect of the human experience, tethering himself to somebody else's conception of limits."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Bernstein (04/03/1996)
"Murray's quest narrative finds Schoolboy heading back home after all this sophisticated yawping. One only hopes this Proustian stomp ain't over yet."
Monaghan
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