Fiction, and all that jazz

I don't listen to jazz very often. But I do read a lot of books, which sometimes leads to interesting musical discoveries.

The Nautical Chart is an intelligent thriller by a Spanish novelist, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. It's about a merchant mariner named Coy, who falls in love with a dangerous woman and gets drawn into her treasure-hunting scheme. Coy spends a lot of lonely hours on the sea, listening to music. Here is how Pérez-Reverte describes Coy listening to jazz:

The first notes of "Lady, Be Good" stippled the lights of the city reflected in the ink-black water ... Little by little, the classic swing of bass chords was interwoven with the intricate entrances of the rest of the instruments--the trumpets of Killian and McGhee, the solos of Arnold Ross at piano, and Charlie Parker on alto. Coy listened to it all intently, headphones to his ears, watching the luminous dots on the water as if the notes flooding his head had materialized on that oily black water. Parker's sound, he decided, was saturated with alcohol, his shirtsleeves reeking of tobacco smoke, and vertical clock hands plunged like knives into the belly of the night. That melody ... had the taste of a port of call.

Wow, I thought. I want to hear that.

So I went to Newport Library's excellent collection of jazz CDs -- we have over 200 titles -- and checked out The Charlie Parker Collection.

I'm not sure that I hear everything in Charlie Parker's alto sax that Coy does, but that's part of what jazz is all about. If you want to sample some music you haven't heard before, come in to the Newport Library and see what we have. (And while you're here, if you like well-written novels about interesting people, you might give The Nautical Chart by Pérez-Reverte a try.)