Early Bright by Ami Silber
A novel of the Central Avenue jazz scene and an outsider's quest to find a place there - and finish a song that's in his head.
KINDA blue is the shelf of jazz lit, where few writers have managed to keep their cool when engaging with the music. Jack Kerouac championed a spontaneous bop prosody, but plotted out or living in the moment, the prosody has rarely harmonized with the bop. John Clellon Holmes' The Horn, a character study of a saxophonist, deserves respect, and Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home has a shaggy, lovable soul. Bassist Charles Mingus wrote the unparalleled Beneath the Underdog, which is, strictly speaking, an autobiography but one so packed with boast and B.S. that it is best read as a courageous, postmodern black parable, the essential truths about a life with none of the conventional truth.
Over the years, the story of jazz has been so tied up with the story of dense Eastern cities and with up-from-the-delta myth-mongering that a place like Los Angeles has seemed off limits. It doesn't fit the conventional tales. Now comes Ami Silber's Early Bright, a book that takes the plunge, a novel immersed in the life of those making music in 1940s L.A. The book follows a spell in the life of Louis Greenberg, a bebop-loving white pianist, as he plays in African American Central Avenue clubs and unspeakable Long Beach dives. Greenberg seeks to finish a composition that's been rolling around in his head for a while; more than that, he seeks to find some way to project himself, an outsider, onto an audience that doesn't know he exists.
In other words, Early Bright is an artist's tale in the broadest sense. And, if making the protagonist a Jewish kid from the Bronx yearning to establish himself in a black milieu weren't steep enough, Silber also makes him a grifter. Greenberg learned his hustling ways on a sojourn that starts with him running away from a judgmental dad and a shame that he is eager to escape. He meets a well-spoken mentor in the Midwest who takes him under his wing. Greenberg arrives in Los Angeles well-tutored in a variety of swindles; a specialty is conning Gold Star mothers and war widows to give him their cash, he explains, to retrieve their lost family member's personal effects from bureaucratic limbo. Greenberg himself is a draft dodger who pulled his first hustle stealing an asthmatic recruit's 4-F papers. His story, and that of Early Bright, is one of an unlikely -- and sometimes unlikable -- protagonist vamping toward . . . what? Honesty? Courage? A great jazz record?
