JAZZ COUNTRY

16 year old white boys from New York's east 70's don't gain an easy admittance to the jazz country of Negro band leaders like Moses Godfrey. Tom Curtis was tolerated at first because he was earnest about playing the trumpet and could take everything Godfrey and his musicians handed out. Tom gradually found himself "inside" with growing respect for the arrogant, honest Godfrey; Tom had begun to learn what jazz, and maybe life, was all about. "You've got to find your own 'thing,'" they told him. "You've got to tell your own story." The author, a well known jazz critic, writes of Tom in the first person. He manages to sustain the tone of a young boy's viewpoint in the vivid idiom of Negro jive talk, coherently used. He incorporates some lessons in jazz appreciation and captures a sense of the abrasive realities of being black in New York. Some of the other characters too often sound like mouthpieces for a crusade rather than people; the intensity and bitterness of the race situation have been caught without the harsh laughter that usually accompanies it as a safety valve. Tom himself is never phony and Godfrey, though idealized, is a complex and memorable man. Here is a book with something important to say about the sacrifices demanded of the artist in a way that makes a strong appeal to boys — and that's a rare combination.