The Seven League Boots

Jazz and fiction haven't invariably made a happy marriage. Often the jazz element seems incidental--an excuse to set the denouement in a smoky nightclub. Every now and then, however, a book appears in which the very texture of the prose is inseparable from the music, and Albert Murray's The Seven League Boots is a perfect example. The third and penultimate installment in a series, the novel revolves around an Alabama-bred bass player named Scooter. When the story opens, the Swing Era is in full flower. Scooter has just graduated from college, and he's immediately enlisted to play with the Bossman--a pianist and composer with a more-than-casual resemblance to Duke Ellington. Like Ellington's music, Murray's prose is a marvelous mixture of lyrical and gutbucket tonalities. And as the Bossman's orchestra tours the United States, Scooter undertakes a journey of discovery, in which centuries of American history are comically or tragically encapsulated.