Horn
From the acclaimed Beat Generation author of Go: The classic jazz novel of New York’s bebop scene and a brilliant musician’s tragic fall.
Edgar Pool came up with the big bands. He spent the 1930s crisscrossing the country, playing in only the finest dance halls. In those days, a saxophone player was expected to stay on the beat, to swing without getting too hot. But Edgar—whom the young men called “the Horn”—couldn’t help but rebel. His sound was always far-out, never pedestrian. When the bebop revolution came, Edgar was recognized as one of the vanguard. But by then it was already too late; the world had passed the Horn by.
This is the story of jazz in the transition years between swing titans Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young and bop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Rich in the details of a musician’s life—the grind of the road; the flash of inspiration; the seduction of booze, drugs, and willing women—it is also a heart-wrenching portrait of the price an artist pays for being ahead of his time.
John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes (1926–1988) was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. He is best remembered for Go (1952), a roman à clef chronicling his experiences with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady in New York City in the 1940s. Published five years before On the Road and distinguished by its emotional honesty, its meticulous attention to detail, and its lyrical evocation of the restlessness that defined post–World War II Manhattan, Go is widely considered to be the first Beat novel and one of the finest. Kerouac coined the term “beat generation” in a conversation with Holmes, who in turn introduced it to the world in a seminal article published in the November 16, 1952 issue of the New York Times Magazine: “This Is the Beat Generation.” Holmes’s other works include the novels Get Home Free (1964) and The Horn (1953), the latter of which was declared by the San Francisco Chronicle to be “the most successful novel about jazz that has ever been published;” the poetry volumes Dire Coasts (1988) and Night Music (1989); and Nothing More to Declare (1967), a collection of essays.
Open Road Integrated Media
