A couple of books I've been re-reading ...

I've just pulled a couple of books down from the shelf - you're never alone with a book or, I suppose, with a mobile phone - that monstrosity that no one seems to be able to live without these days. However, that's neither here nor there as both these stories were created long before such things were let loose on the world.

Dorothy Baker: Young Man With a Horn (sanitised by British censors for the filmed approximation as Young Man of Music), written in 1938, it purports to be inspired by the music, if not the life, of Bix Beiderbecke. Nevertheless, Baker was probably the first novelist to get a feel for fictional jazz writing and an insight into its origins despite some of the racist terms - the N word then was as acceptable as the F word is becoming today.'

The hero, Rick Martin, or should that be anti-hero like the guy in Look Back in Anger? is a jazz musician, a great who is unable to cope with life outside of music - a true artist! He falls in love with the wrong woman, his intellectual superior  and from then on ...

Earl Mac Rauch: New York, New York. The book that inspired the screenplay for the Robert De Niro/Liza Minnelli film of the same name and, the ultimate theme song for NYC (conveniently forgetting that a a song of the same name had already done that in On the Town - were there law suits? I don't know). Written in 1977, the two books have similarities in as much as both Johnny Boyle and Rick Martin are great jazz musicians, oblivious to the outer world and incapable of holding on to a relationship. Both have ego problems which ultimately bring them both down. In Boyle's case there's a hint of the A Star is Born syndrome although very slight as, although the relationship is over and Francine is the big star, Johnny still has his own life to pursue.

The film versions had Harry James ghosting Kirk Douglas as Rick Martin and Georgie Auld doing likewise for Robert De Niro's Johnny Boyle.

For all the inaccuracies both are worth reading/watching. Lance

Ps: As an amusing footnote. When the New York Yankees won a baseball game they played Sinatra's version of New York, New York. When they lost they played Minnelli's - until her legal team went into action.