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antishurtugal_rebornMay 8, 1923
We finally get an actual date! So this entire book has taken place in about six months so far.
Williams is practicing, and Hugh comes home earlier than usual.
"Look at you woodsheddin' away at that piano, Mary Berry," he said. ('Mary Berry' is his nickname for her.)
I stopped playing a minute and looked up at hime. "Woodshedding? What does that mean, Hugh?"
He grinned. "It mean you practicing real hard, like crazy even. And that's good."
Back to powerpoint class slides.
Hugh has a surprise for her: Lovie Austin, a famous piano player, will be in Pittsburgh next week and Hugh is going to take Williams to hear her.
We get more powerpoint conversation about Austin and then suddenly we're in the music hall. It's crowded, and Williams has trouble seeing over the crowd because she's just a short 13-year-old kid. Hugh finds himself a seat and lets Williams sit on his lap 8| and supposedly that makes her taller than just standing and she's able to see the performers. Also the performers are down in the orchestra pit, instead of up on the stage, so whatever. Imagine the setup however you want because Kelly clearly did.
Williams is shocked to see that Austin is a Black lady like her, and she's the one conducting the five men of her band. She's smoking her cigarette while she plays piano with her left and and writes music with her right. Williams thinks this is the most badass thing that's ever badassed and she determines she's going to be that badass some day.
But we can't forget about Max. Williams almost does, because she's dreaming about leading her own band, but she still misses Max.
You would think for seeing a woman that Williams apparently did say was a huge influence on her, we'd get more than two pages about it.
A couple months later, Hugh comes home with a wooden cabinet in the back of a pickup truck, and gets their neighbor to help carry it in.
Mamie's pregnant and she's got morning sickness really bad and she's decided to take a walk to Mama's house and get some of Nanny's special tea for nausea.
Hugh and the neighbor get the cabinet inside. It's got a crank on the side but Williams is not sure what it is. Hugh spent $250 on this thing, though he's paying $10 a month rather than all at once.
It's a Victrola phonograph, the latest model, in solid mahogany and hardware plated in gold. Williams isn't interested about all that though, she just wants to know how to make it play music. She and Hugh play around with the thing, he shows her how the needle fits into the grooves on the discs to make sound. Williams is astounded by the piano music that starts coming out of it.
They're listening to a recording of Thomas "Fats" Waller, his first one ever, with his songs Birmingham Blues and Muscle Shoals Blues. Williams is in awe of how he uses his left hand (bass notes), and Hugh explains he uses a style called 'stride'. They start dancing around to the music. Hugh tells her that Waller is only 18, so she's only got five years to catch up to him!
Williams takes to listening to Waller on the phonograph as often as possible and then trying the style herself on her piano. People can hear her playing and they stop by to listen.
Folks kept telling me I played like a man which was quite a compliment. Nothing was worse than being told you play piano like a girl.
After her earlier statement to Max that she didn't even think about her gender when she was playing.
Her thoughts drift from Waller to Grandpa to Max. Sadly, Hugh is not able to keep up payments on the Victrola so it gets repossessed, leaving Williams with only the records and no way to play them.
Who cares about the phonograph when you can just have a radio? And that's exactly what Hugh comes home with one day. Now Williams can listen to Pittsburgh station KDKA any time she wants and hear the latest music. She gets to hear Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and of course more Fats Waller. She gets to hear new styles of dance music too, like the Charleston, foxtrot, and shimmy. She imitates them all on her piano.
Which should all be well and good, except that Mama had been acting weird the last time Williams visited her. Mama's trying to act really polite, and Williams figures she's trying to get back in her good graces so she can access the money Williams earns from playing piano. So Williams eventually stops visiting her at all.
The Good Spirit visits her in a dream and tells her to keep up with her music.
Mamie's baby is due very soon but she still insists on doing her house chores, including fussing at Williams to stop playing piano for five minutes and go eat something, or go outside and play with the other kids. Oh, it's October now. Williams politely declines.
Williams still misses Max. He had promised he'd write but he never did.
For all the impression that Mamie was due soon, she's actually due around New Year's. Kelly really has a terrible sense of timing in her books.
The baby ends up coming early and cries a lot (seems like a trait in this family). Turns out that Williams' Doll Dance song is just what the baby needs to be lulled to sleep.
Hugh announces that Fats Waller is coming to town, and Hugh's been hired to play sax in his backup band. He's excited, Williams is excited, but there's only one problem: he'll be playing at a speakeasy.
"You need a password to get in."
"A password? What's that?"
Ah, so we're back to Kelly making her protagonist a vapid shit for no reason. She likes to do that.
Williams wants to see Waller badly enough that she decides to risk running afoul of the police with Hugh. Hugh gives the speakeasy doorman the password and they get in.
Williams is surprised to see that Waller isn't all grins like he is on the cover of the record box, he's working hard with the speakeasy owner, Mr. Harper as they rehearse the dancers. Apparently Waller is composing music for the dancers on the spot.
Williams sneaks closer to watch Waller play the new tunes for Mr. Harper. She finds she's actually a bit frightened with seeing his hands move, so she closes her eyes to just listen.
So I closed my eyes and listened real hard. And a strange thing happened. Just like when I was three years old and watched Mama play the pump organ, I could hear what note Fats was going to play next. Like telling someone's fortune. Then I could see what I felt in my heart and I knew what was happening with Fats's music. I guess my gift of seeing gave my mind and ears a fastness in that way.
As soon as Waller stops playing, Hugh approaches him and points to Williams, telling him that she can play everything she just heard him play, just by listening to him. Waller laughs, not believing him, but lets Williams come over to the piano to show him.
I looked up at him. He was smiling at me in a charming way, like a great big roly-poly little boy. I felt so tiny next to him.
Besides making her characters be vapid shits when it's convenient, Kelly also likes making her protagonists be dainty little fairy girls.
Williams gets over her nerves and does indeed play everything she just heard.
My favorite was the one Fats called "You Take It From Me and I'm Taking It To You."
How does she know what the titles are if he just came up with them and she's not reading the music? Also I'm not sure what piece of music this is, quick Googling isn't turning up anything like that title by Waller.
Waller is so overjoyed by her talent that he just whisks her right off the piano bench and spins around with her. He asks where she learned to play like that, and Hugh says she just taught herself, and Waller finds that completely believable because that's what he did himself. Waller tells Mr. Harper to hire Williams on for a week, starting right that moment, as an opener for the people coming in while they wait for Waller's show.
Williams finds a freedom in playing when people aren't completely focused on her. Finally, Waller comes out and she gets to stop so she can watch him. She's as enamored with his playing as he was with hers.
Suddenly, in the middle of the show, Waller stops and calls out to Williams to come join him. Everybody turns to look at her and she freezes, but Waller calls out to her again and she's able to make her way to the stage.
She can only think to play "My Mama Pinned Rose on Me" missing 'a' spotted! Waller joins in with his signature bass line. The audience loves it.
And this is the sort of descriptive scene that we needed at several other points in the story. This is actually good writing and despite myself I find I am enjoying it.
After it was all over and I was stepping down from the bandstand whoe should I see but Amy Frank, looking all brazen with her short blond hair and a shorter dress. A regular flapper.
AAAARGH GOOD MOMENT RUINED also ffs this girl is 12 or 13ish, a liiiittle young to be getting in on flapper culture but sure, whatever.
They size each other up for a bit, and Amy says that her friend's big brother got them in. He's a regular, of course.
But Amy is not here to be mean. In fact, she actually complements Williams.
But she surprised me. "You were fabulous."
"I was what?" I could feel my mouth hanging open.
"You know, really nifty."
And she actually means it.
And with that, the Good Spirit has slain the Ghost Dog.
Williams plays with Waller every night he's in town. Daddy Fletcher even shows up to hear her. But not Mama, not Nanny, and not Max. But she's decided that music has won in the war between Max and music.
She meditates on how music brings people together, and jazz is made of love.
The power of the caul, the veil that kept me separate from folks since the day I was born, was nothing compared to the power of the Good Spirit. The Good Spirit had used my gift of second sight and the music in my head to bring jazz into my life. And I knew jazz would always be my most faithful friend. It would live in my heart forever, and it would save me.
And that, my friends, is the book.
Let's see what stuff Kelly says about this book!
Williams ended up performing with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as a young teen, and in 1927 she married a saxophonist, John Williams. She had a very successful career and was known as a great jazz musician. In the 1950's she converted to Catholicism and became very involved in her faith, doing a lot of charitable work and turning her music mostly to sacred music. Including a jazz-based mass. She became and Artist In Residence at Duke University, where she taught jazz history until she passed away in 1981.
Oh...that's it. That's the author's note.
In Kelly's acknowledgments, she lists "My Life with the Kings of Jazz," "Music Can Help Youth," and "What I Learned from God About Jazz" as reference materials, so there you go, if yo'ure interested in learning more.
You can also go to www.belcantopress.com to see photos and listen to music! Except that it's defunct! :} which leads me more to my theory that this was a press that Kelly herself had a hand in creating, maybe through the college where she teaches.
Page 198 is blank.
Followed by five unnumbered blank pages, then one with the bar code and stuff. That doesn't strike me as particuarly good formatting but I admittedly don't know much about the book layout business.
I feel like reprinting what's on the back cover (a few words are my assumptions as the library bar code is slapped over some of them):
13-year-old Mary was marked from birth by the "sign of the caul," a powerful sign in African-American culture. The caul indicates rare powers, especially a tendency [for a] "second sight." Mary's special gift of seeing manifests itself in visions of ghosts and [???] and culminates in an uncanny musical ability
An okay blurb, except I'm not a fan of the term 'African-American culture' and that is the exact thing that pushed me to spork this book.
"Sarah Bruce Kelly gets inside the heart and hear of pianist Mary Lou Williams and [shows] us the perspective of an artist who hopes music will set her free...and it does. F[rom the] first hurdle to the last, what didn't kill her made her stronger. I'm not ashamed to [admit] Kelly had me near tear more than a few times. In her latest real life "girl power" [novel] Jazz Girl, Kelly takes the reader on the troubled yet hopeful journey of a musical [prodigy] and I found myself rooting for Mary Lou every step of the way. Highly recommended."
-Anthony Dowd, jazz pianist, Mary Lou Williams' former student
I think that's this guy, not seeing Williams listed as one of his teachers though? Could be that he took a master class with her, you do that and you can list that person as a 'teacher'. Not going to speculate further on that other than to say it takes some balls to hand a book like this to someone who presumably knew the individual in question pretty well. Did he proofread it too or just read the final product?
"In her trademarked, forthright style, I guess you could call it that Kelly shapes the scenes in Mary's life with raw, sometimes jarring, openness. I call that jarring nature a lack of finesse, but you do you. The physical and mental poundings ffs even the reviewers are saying that this little girl absorbs would break most adults. Her world is laden with fearful spirituality and frightening fra[???]. Her life is so fraught with pain that we can believe those who claim the caul is a curse. So even this reviewer picked up on how drudgingly depressing this book is. Yet, her gifts, musical and mystical, manifest at each tortuous twist to help her survive[,] eventually to conquer."
-R. M. O'Geaney, MA, LLB
I suspect O'Geaney is a colleague or friend of Kelly but I can't find anything for sure.
"Sarah Kelly has again penned an excellent historical novel in her latest book JAZZ GIRL. From the very first page she captures the reader's interest and holds it throughout the book. The characters come alive on the page and we find ourselves rooting for the heroine throughout her struggles to attain her goal as a major jazz pianist in a field held mostly by men."
-Louanna Sowa, author of THE DIARY
I'm very sorry, but that is the most generic review I've ever read, enough that it makes me wonder if Sowa even read the book. I also cannot find info on whatever "The Diary" is, but again given what I can find I assume Sowa is a friend of Kelly's, or with the writing group she's in (see the next review).
"Sarah Bruce Kelly's Jazz Girl gives readers an intimate glimpse into the childhood of American jazz icon, Mary Lou Williams. Kelly's story gives Mary an authentic voice and reverberates with the rhythms of Mary's musical genius."
-Trilby Plants, Author and Editor of THE PETIGRU REVIEW, the literary journal of the South Carolina Writers Workshop.
Which I assume Kelly is a part of, always a good idea to be in a professional or hobby organization! A slightly less generic review but still not one that entirely convinces me that Plants read the same book I did.
So, in the spirit of my roundup at the end of Vivaldi's Muse, here's what I would give as writing advice to Kelly if she were to rework this book:
-Overall the writing is a touch better than in Vivaldi's Muse, which is a little concerning because Vivaldi's Muse was published after Jazz Girl. I think this one did see a little more actual editing. But not enough.
-Please stop writing romance, or practice it way more before your next publishing attempt. Romance is not your thing. Especially, especially do not touch the issue of incestuous underage romance with a ten-foot pole. You are not a good enough author to handle that with grace. Neither am I, and I'm not sure there are many who are good enough. Just don't go there. If it was indeed a Historical Fact in this person's life, you're going to have a lot of work ahead of you to not totally turn off your modern audience.
-Definitely still need more practice with the powerpoint-style dialogue.
-The writing itself may have been better but still, nothing of any importance really happened until three quarters of the way through the book. If I hadn't been doing this as a spork, I would have dropped the book after a fraction of that because it's just not interesting. It's repetitive, it's negative, and I didn't care about any of it.
-Being consistent with how you write out an accent is tough but if you're going to write out an accent, you NEED to do it. And use dialect correctly.
-The end did not get quite so rushed and jumbled like with Vivaldi's Muse, so kudos for that! In fact, this bolsters my sense that Kelly is actually a decent enough author for young adult books set within a short time frame (less than a year, in this case). She still needs a strong editor to help her work through her weak points though, and I'm not convinced she had that with this book still. Because a strong editor would have told her to knock it off with the incessant negativity. And the incest. And help her pace things better.
(To be entirely honest I have no idea if this book was marketed as YA or NA or adult fiction or what. I can't find any info on that. I presumed YA given the style similarity to The Red Priest's Annina.)
-I am still not entirely comfortable with how Kelly handled references to slavery and such. That's something an editor could have helped with, or a sensitivity reader.
...I guess I just don't have much to say, because I've already said it before, and also probably because I don't know nearly as much about jazz and Mary Lou Williams as I do about baroque music and Vivaldi. And I just found so much of this book boring, and telling someone to 'make it less boring' isn't helpful advice. Kelly needs more practice writing novels that are going to be enjoyable to the general population, she needs a stronger editor to guide her, but she does have the abilities and drive and if she ever decides to write more books I wish her luck.
So there you have it. That's Jazz Girl by Sarah Bruce Kelly. Time to send this book back on its way to Myrtle Beach.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 05:44 am (UTC)Always been my philosophy.
There wasn't even a plot, for goodness' sake. Nothing got resolved, unless you count all those "big problems" that were instantly taken away on the next page.
I'm amazed that alleged student of the real Williams didn't take offence. I would have.
And whose only role is to be all "OMG YOU ARE SO AMAZING" at our perfect heroine.
Being a "strong female character" or having "girl power" means being brave, resourceful and determined. It does NOT mean pulling an Eragon and whining your way to victory.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 11:55 am (UTC)And that I think is Kelly's biggest weakness. Her books follow a timeline of events and she thinks that counts as a plot. As long as things happen when they're supposed to, nothing else matters, to the point of none of the characters needing any development whatsoever, and even whatever plot there may be doesn't need to make sense. This isn't even plot-driven writing, this is just following her class powerpoint slides, honest to God I seriously wonder if she just tried to turn her teaching outlines into books. Just following a powerpoint presentation without providing insight or explanation has never been fun or interesting in any context.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 06:25 am (UTC)It's because real life rarely makes for a good story. Real life doesn't have big exciting climaxes that happen at the right time for a good narrative structure, and in real life when bad things happen it's not necessarily going to be because of a big evil villain who's got it out for you; it's just bad luck or your own bad decisions. I had my life ruined by a horrible person, but that person didn't do it because they were MWAHAHAHAH EVIL or even had anything against me. They did it because it was convenient for them to screw me over.
So yeah, even if it's "true to life", it's not going to work if it's just a string of "and then this happened and then that happened" until the book just fizzles out.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-01 01:08 pm (UTC)And this is what makes biopics hard! If you follow a biography to the T, then it's just a textbook and nobody likes that. If you fictionlize it too much, then you get Amadeus-style 'inspired by' stories that are enjoyable but barely recognizable as history.
If you do like me and turn it into fantasy, then you have to wrestle with problems like yes, this Catholic priest is a werewolf, this is fine, but what is not fine is getting the color of his vestments wrong for the time of year *cough*
It's not like Kelly doesn't know how to change elements of a biography to serve a narrative. She turned Williams and her 11 siblings into just her and one older sister, after all. I don't know enough about Williams to say how closely Kelly stuck to her biographical timeline, but if it was anything like Vivaldi's Muse, her decision to follow the timeline to the letter despite what changes she made to characters is confusing and jarring.
Anyway, I have realized that nothing ever came from the plot point of William's mother vomiting blood (that seems like a fairly major event to me), nor of William's decision to find out more about the Ghost Dog story despite Nanny's refusal to help (the Ghost Dog just ends up going away anyway). However I did come across a John the Conqueror King personage in relation to Hoodoo religion, perhaps this is the same Johnkankus we also got no info about.