Twelve Bar Blues
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Patrick Neate |
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| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Honors | |
| Twelve Bar Blues is an epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the hot tones of his coronet. But Lick’s true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister, for whom he searches among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di… | |
Twelve Bar Blues is an epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the hot tones of his coronet. But Lick’s true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister, for whom he searches among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di Napoli, a black English former prostitute turned singer who travels from London to America in 1999 to find the answer to the mystery of her family’s roots.
Funny and poignant, Twelve Bar Blues is a dynamic novel with all the emotional energy and breakneck tempo of a red-hot Big Easy jazz band that will hook you—like a favorite tune—until the very last page.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
An adventurous, musically structured yarn that begins in 18th-century Africa and ends in present-day New York City, Twelve Bar Blues, British writer Patrick Neate’s second book, was a surprise winner of the 2002 Whitbread Novel of the Year. For the most part Neate’s prose is enthralling, beginning with a semihallucinatory tale of a jealous witch doctor’s sabotage of his childhood friend. The latter is stolen by slave traders and sent to America; a century or so later, his descendant, Fortis “Lick” Holden, survives poverty in Louisiana to become an early pioneer of the jazz form. Over the course of Neate’s story, we meet up with Louis Armstrong in 1920s New Orleans; cruise the slums and jazz joints of Chicago, London, and Africa; meet up with Tongo Kalulu, the love-conflicted chief of the Zimindo, a strong tribe; and travel to America with a black, retired London prostitute in search of her real father. Neate has a few lapses in judgment: several supporting characters don’t ring true (one feels like a thin surrogate for the author), and the air goes out of his writing when he begins to think in clichés. But all is forgiven through the scope of this wild novel, with its inspired network of familial connections over many years and its deep mysteries that reach, like roots, through layers of American history and identity. —Tom Keogh
