Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel
, and it courses with the verve and swing of the music that defined an era. From
the beginning, Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick u
p a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the boss at the Cotton Club that he
was underage or to the folks in the band that he was just a white kid.
He st
arted out with nothing in the slums of LA, but there was a kind of fate to his e
nding up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But w
here instinct and drive are all you need to take you far in music, they aren't e
nough to make a life work. Baker took her inspiration for Young Man with a Horn
from the tragic life of Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted int
o a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
