Tiger Rag

October 22, 2012
Poet and novelist Christopher (Veronica) mixes fiction with jazz history in this delightful dual narrative. In July 1904, Charles “Buddy” Bolden, “the father of all jazz trumpeters,” is in New Orleans recording “Tiger Rag” with his band on three Edison wax cylinders. Since the recordings were never released and Bolden never cut another track, their whereabouts are of great significance. Jump to December 2010, when, after a messy divorce, middle-aged Miami anesthesiologist Ruby Cardillo contacts her daughter, Devon Sheresky, a jazz pianist and recovering drug addict. Together they drive to New York City so an increasingly manic Ruby can deliver a professional association speech and Devon can meet with Emmett Browne, an elderly music dealer who attempted to contact her recently deceased grandmother. As the chapters alternate between narratives, the schizophrenic Bolden is locked away at age 29, and one of his recordings makes its way to Devon’s thieving grandfather, journeyman trumpeter Valentine Owen. Emmett tries to conspire with Devon to retrieve the recording from its present owner, the psychic Joan Neptune, who knew and banned the unsavory Valentine. Based on the real-life rumor the recordings exist, Christopher’s intriguing yarn lays out how their zealous guardians have preserved Buddy Bolden’s jazz legacy. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

November 15, 2012
The story of history's most enigmatic jazz trumpeter becomes a touchstone for a troubled doctor and her daughter. Talented poet and novelist Christopher (The Bestiary, 2007, etc.) returns to the rich vein of early-20th-century American history for his elegiac and expressive sixth novel. The book opens on a hotel room in New Orleans circa 1904, where seven musicians huddle over their instruments in stifling heat. Christopher captures this long-whispered moment perfectly, as Charles "Buddy" Bolden and his boys lay down three inspired recordings of a song known as "Number 2"--aficionados know it as "Tiger Rag" today-- before fading into the night. From this point, the author folds this rumored bit of jazz history into a modern-day search for the lost cylinders. His protagonist is Ruby Cardillo, a hot mess of a divorcee who's taken to only wearing purple and downing numerous bottles of Bordeaux. She recruits her daughter, jazz pianist and recovering addict Devon, to drive with her to New Orleans so that Ruby can deliver a speech about anesthesiology. In New York, they meet with music dealer Emmett Browne, who believes that Devon's grandfather Valentine Owen was a compatriot of Bolden's who may have squirreled away the legendary recordings. The manic Ruby and damaged Devon's journey makes for fine drama, and Christopher delivers well-drawn and convincing characters in all their screwed-up glory. But the book's wonder comes from Bolden's downward spiral into alcoholism, schizophrenia and dementia, even as Christopher captures one brief moment of clarity. "In 1931 Charles Bolden picked up where he had left off in 1906, just that once stepping back into real time by way of his music, which had thrived in the outside world while he himself was wasting away," he writes. "It was as if, for a few minutes, without being remotely aware of it, much less imagining the possibility in such grand terms, he had been allowed to participate in his own immortality." Red hot and cool.

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August 1, 2012

The exquisite writer Christopher should be better known; perhaps this juicy new novel will do it. Dr. Ruby Cardillo's cardiologist husband has left her and her estranged mother has died, so she drafts her gifted jazz-musician daughter (just out of rehab) for a trip to snowbound New York, where they hunt for a recording Edison was said to have made.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
Poet and author of several novels and a well-received book on film noir, Somewhere in the Night (1997), Christopher here offers a novel based on the life of early jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden. Although little is definitively known about Bolden and no recordings survive, this is territory explored in fictional form before, by Michael Ondaatje in Coming through Slaughter (1993). Told through accounts of Bolden and his contemporaries and alternately of a present-day mother-daughter duo, the story hinges on the possible existence of an Edison cylinder recorded by Bolden's group in 1904 New Orleans. Though the pacing occasionally lags, this generally compelling story should appeal to jazz buffs eager to read about Bolden, Bechet, Bunk Johnson, et al., however imagined; to the coterie of readers of Bill Moody's similarly themed jazz mysteries; and to fans of the talented and prolific Christopher.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)