The Bookshelf'

Out of a swing-crazy world has come a small book called "Young Man With a Horn", by Dorothy Baker which rather unconsciously contains about the finest description of swing music that could be put into words. It is a short novel, inspired by the playing of an excellent musician in a jazz orchestra who died several years ago, and it merely tells the story of Rick Martin, who found in swing an outlet for artistic expression but at the same time a destructive medium which he could not fit to his life.

In an expressive style that is straight-forward and almost conversational Dorothy Baker describes how Rick Martin, a boy with musical talent, naturally turned toward swing music since it was the only music where he lived. There, in the midst of good jazz which, as Miss Baker says, 'comes right out of genuine urge and doesn't come for money," the boy lived and breathed swing and gradually developed into one of the finest trumpeters in the country. Success and money came rapidly but they could not stop Rick, he couldn't stop; he kept on playing-pushing himself beyond the limits of human endurance. His death was inevitable.

Therefore, the book in a way marks the limits of swing music. Rick Martin needed jazz and expected too much from it; he kept playing never satisfied, until he could not keep pace with hi sown playing. Yet those very limits show what swing really is; the crazy almost destructive life that goes with it is part of a native American form of art a noisy yet magnetic medium for American creation.

Many people will disagree with this book Often it seems to find in jazz more than actually is there in order to make such a life as Martin's possible. Nine-tenths of modern swing has not the creative urge behind it, yet it is the one-tenth which Miss Baker has singled out as the only genuinely important part, and she had done a great favor in telling the world that there is this one kind of jazz worth thinking about.