The Magic Keys

January 1, 2005
In this conclusion to Murray's autobiographical quartet, NYU grad student Scooter knows that he's meant to be great-but at what?

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2005
No one has brought jazz to the page as vibrantly as lauded essayist and fiction writer Murray. In a string of collagelike novels--" Train Whistle Guitar" (1989), " The Spyglass Tree " (1991), and " The Seven League Boots" (1996)--Murray recounts the coming-of-age adventures of his gifted hero, bass player and book lover Scooter of Gasoline Point, Alabama. In this episodic and syncopated installment, Scooter is living in New York and searching for his true calling, a quandary sorted out in free-flowing conversations with Taft Edison, a fictionalized portrait of Murray's dear friend, Ralph Ellison, and the artist Roland Beasley, a homage to the great Romare Bearden. As Scooter and his friends talk about literature, art, music, and life, Murray riffs on the richness of the "down-home idiom," spins bebop variations on fairy-tale motifs, and digs the improvisational energy of creative lives. Born in 1916, the still-swinging Murray is also reflecting on his own experiences and, most splendidly, summoning up the great whirl of life, "the also and also of all which is." (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)