The Bass Saxophone by Josef Škvorecký

The Bass Saxophone Reviews

• 
  Glenn Russell

  
  
  
  "And it rose in front of me. A mechanism of strong, silver-plated wires, the gears, the levers, like the mechanism of some huge and absolutely nonsensical apparatus, the fantasy of some crazy mixed-up inventor." On eighteen-year-old jazz enthusiast Danny's first beholding the bass saxophone.
  
  The wild freedom of jazz meets Nazi rules and regulations - The Bass Saxophone by Czech author Josef Škvorecký has been acclaimed one of the most powerful short novels in all of literature.
  
  In his introductory essay, Mr. Škvorecký lists the Nazi regulations, ten in number, applicable to Czech dance orchestras at the time of his country's occupation. Here's a snippet: "As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated." Nothing like a bunch of uptight, mentally constipated, goosestepping weinersnitzels attempting to reel in the explosive funk of riffing cool cats.
  
  How those jackboots loathed what they termed Judeonegroid music with its yowls and wailing and giving in to "dark" rhythms and bending of sound from a wah-wah trumpet mute or buzzing trombone or the ultimate insult, the base saxophone, that monstrous centaur, metallic rhino, hulking behemoth, a silver serpent sounding its deep anti-Aryan vibrations.
  
  The Bass Saxophone contains elements of folk fable, a charming story of the clashing of totalitarian power with the freedom of artistic expression. Since there is little action beyond the youthful narrator, let's call him Danny, meeting up and playing with a group of traveling musicians in a Nazi occupied town, I'll shift to offering comments on specific passages.
  
  "Holy cow, I said to myself, and it was funny all of a sudden, because every deviation from the norm is an impulse to laughter - people are apt to be conventional, and unfeeling toward everything but themselves." ---------- In all his young life, Danny was never a believer in apparitions, hallucinations, parapsychology or miracles; his only myth was music. Now that he's holding a bass saxophone for the first time it is as if he's entered another dimension, soaring over the realm of the serious, the routinized, a world of strictly enforced regularity and compliance.
  
  "I walked down the back staircase to the hotel auditorium with the bass saxophone in my arms. The brown twilight was transformed into the murky dusk of dim electric lights." ----------- Danny is about to groove with what just might be a group of circus freak show performers: an ugly fat woman with a clown nose, an amputee, a hunchback, a dwarf, a swan-like beauty, a giant playing accordion.
  
  "My eyes followed the notes; it was a waltz in A minor, a very simple affair, based on the effect of deep notes, certainly not what I yearned to play on this saxophone - it was no Rollini - although it was exactly what I was capable of playing from sheet music. But again, why?" ---------- Surprise, surprise! Turns out this band isn't about jazz; rather, they will be playing music of the waltz, polka, oom pah pah variety.
  
  "The senseless happiness of music engulfed me like a golden bath; it's a happiness that never depends on the objective, only the subjective, and perhaps it has a more profound link with the humanness of things because it''s altogether senseless: the strenuous production of certain nonsensical sounds - that are no good for anything." ---------- Music is music. Once the colossal chords of the stupendous sax are brought to life, it is art for art's sake. Groove, Danny, groove baby!
  
  
  
  'Horst Hermann Kühl: the name mentally slotted itself into place too, and along with it sounded the mad, threatening voice behind the wallpaper." ---------- Danny thought he heard the voice of Kühl, member of the Gestapo, back when he was up in the hotel room with the circus musicians. Understandable. When you are under the thumb of a foreign police state, there is hardly a time when you don't hear a threatening voice, real or imagined, in the next room.
  
  "Then they locked Vicherek up for "the public performance of eccentric Negroid music," . . . you can't distinguish between what happened and what is a dream; so swiftly gone; but that is the way it should be." --------- Ah, the absurdity of men and women put under arrest and dragged off to prison or put in front of a firing squad for the most unreasonable reasons. Living through such deadly times can appear as an unending dream or nightmare.
  
  "A velvet gown; and behind it other satined and brocaded German ladies with a mobile jewelry exhibition, the origin of which could not have been reliably proven in a more strictly legalistic society, little shining stories ending in death; and black, brown, and gray uniforms; a panorama of iron crosses." ----------- Peering through a peephole, Danny sees the audience for their performance: German women wearing jewelry stolen from Jews destined for the gas chamber; SS men settling in for an evening's entertainment that could turn into a death sentence for the performers at any moment.
  
  How will it all end for Danny and his band? I encourage you to read Josef Škvorecký's short, jazzy, dreamy classic for yourself.
  
  
  Nazis marching into Prague
  
  Note: This book also includes a second novella, Emöke, also about playing jazz in Czechoslovakia but this time under the watchful eye of a Soviet police state. I'll be posting a separate review.
  
  
  Josef Škvorecký, 1924-2012
• 
  Paul

  This slim volume gathers together two novellas by Czech writer, Josef Škvorecký, both of which were written in the mid 1960s. At this time, Škvorecký was considered a dissident and earlier books of his had been banned. Following the events of 1968, he would leave Czechoslovakia for good. His love for saxophones and jazz and his descriptions of music put me in mind of Julio Cortázar. Both novellas are modernist in their construction, featuring many rambling, improvised, two to three page paragraphs, influenced no doubt by modern jazz composition. Cave lector!: in common with other Central European fiction that I've read from this period, it's far from politically correct and highly chauvinistic.
  
  The first is Emöke, originally called The Legend of Emöke. It concerns the "intellectual" but cynical narrator's brief infatuation with the titular Emöke, an ingenuous and fragile Hungarian single mother whom he meets at a holiday camp in Czechoslovakia. How can the cognisant reader not be reminded of Ferenc Karinthy's Epepe (published in the Anglophone world as Metropole), also named for its love interest? Both protagonists blow their chances with the young women concerned and come to regret it. In Emöke, the narrator plays with the heady power of sexual and romantic attraction only to find it blow up in his face. This account of a people's republic at play brings to life a strange, lost world.
  
  The Bass Saxophone was written the year before the Prague Spring. This time the setting is Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It's a dream-like tale featuring the titular instrument, a kind of mythical creature that enchants the narrator, and a travelling septet of shabby outsider musicians (one is a hunchback, another legless and so on - only the female singer is physically perfect) led by one Lothar Kinze. The narrator somehow finds himself on stage with this ragged ensemble, playing the bass saxophone to an assembly of Nazi dignitaries before being dragged off and replaced by the instrument's owner. And that's it, really. Jazz was a symbol of freedom for dissidents in the communist East - think of the allure of the young saxophonist in Ida. It fulfils the same role here under Nazism. Totalitarian regimes don't like jazz; it defies their discipline. The vast valve instrument blows a ground-shaking raspberry at the murderous, thieving invader.
• 
  Davis

  Skvorecky experienced the Nazi occupation of czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring. This short novel reads like a Fellini film.
  The characters are unforgetable. Skvorecky, an old teacher,now,
  living in Canada (if still alive)also wrote several fine coming of age novels and a couple of good mysteries. All of his work is infused with a love of jazz. How can I not like the guy?
• 
  Czarny Pies

  Joseph Skvorecky was a writer who experimented with many genres. With the occasional misfire, he was successful most of the time. The two novellas in this collection constitute a foray into the occult and fantastic. While Emoke is an honourable effort, the Bass Saxophone is a resounding success.
  
  Although, Skvorecky was an avowed fan of Edgar Allen Poe, I found the mood similar to that which I experienced when as a little boy, I first heard a recording of Alan Mills and Jean Carignan' performing Ti-Jean and the Devil.
  
  The protagonist of the Bass Saxophone is Danny Smiricky, Skvorecky's literary alter ego. As the story begins Danny is living in German occupied Czechoslovakia. His main interest in live is playing Jazz on the Saxophone. One night Danny gets a chance to join an orchestra playing at a Nazi Ball. He accepts because if he does so he will get the chance to play the very rare, mythical bass saxophone which is so uncommon that Smiricky has never even seen one before.
  
  Skvorecky joins the band in an onirique, hallucinatory ball room. The other orchestra members are all physical oddities but they play with enormous skill. Danny is nothing less than brilliant on the weird instrument. Eventually the ball room evaporates. The orchestra of goblins and phantoms departs. Danny is left wondering what it all meant. Did he sell his soul to the devil or did he just take advantage of a unique opportunity to be for one night a great artist? The reader certainly hopes that Danny, like Ti-Jean has emerged unscathed from his encounter.
  
  
• 
  Kurt Gottschalk

  I read, Emoke, a lovely tale of suppressed romance, while traveling in Prague. Even decades after its wartime setting, it resonated with the land I was visiting. It's a wonderful novella that transcends any prejudices against stories about love or war.
  

  
  It took me a couple months after returning to New York to get to the title story of the book, but when I did I finished it in a single day (to a soundtrack of Anthony Braxton, John Butcher and Urs Leimgruber). This is a fantastic piece of writing! It too is a Nazi-occupation tale, but Skvorecky writes wonderfully about sentimental music and poorly played music, about idolizing instruments and interpersonal anxieties. The slightly hallucinatory story works like a prolonged saxophone solo: Sometimes you have to trust the artist and ride his wave, knowing it'll come around again
• 
  Dennis

  There are some books that just FEEL Czech and after living there for so many years, I could feel this book, based on the people I knew. Really delightful.
• 
  Jerry Pogan

  Two excellent novellas beautifully written by Skvorecky. The first titled "Emoke" was about a young man who meets an attractive but very strange young woman. She is very spiritual combining traditional religious beliefs with mysticism and other supernatural beliefs while he is an atheist. He hopes to begin a romance but things didn't work out for him. The other story was "The Bass Saxophone" about a young Czech man who is reluctantly drawn into a group of German musicians. The story is told in long interminable but very poetic sentences that seem to go on for pages to describe seemingly minor events. However, it was quite a good read.
• 
  Tyler Jones

  To put the experience of music - how it moves one internally, how it puts one apart and above the world while connecting one more strongly with the world; the particular kind of ecstasy music can trigger - putting that into words is no easy thing. But Skvorecky, in one beautiful passage in this book, has come closer than anyone else I have ever read to accomplishing this feat. Add to that the tension of a young man yearning for freedom (and girls) in a Nazi occupied Czech town and you have the makings of a really great book. I loved it.
• 
  Marguerite

  Found this gem at the CNU library. It speaks eloquently of music as a force for hope and change in a totalitarian society and more specifically of jazz as a redemptive force. I wonder if the music is better now that the society is more open.
• 
  Wendy

  I love Josef Skvorecky. Creates the deepest longest and loveliest sentences that ramble with much meaning.
• 
  Ana-Maria Petre

  I have mixed feelings about this book. It felt like dreaming of a deserted place, where the ghosts of ordinary lives still lingers in broken shop windows. A strange, glitchy dream you'd be glad to wake up from, but also a little sad that the place you dreamt of never existed, and will never exist again.
• 
  Stosch

  eh
• 
  Steve

  A book containing two novellas by a Czech author seems perfect to follow up all the history I've read lately. The first, Emoke, is told by a man who ostensibly falls head over heels for a woman he meets on vacation, but she is far too fixated on some metaphysical journey she's on. He tries again and again, and eventually settles for getting revenge on his fellow supplicant at her alter. The second, The Bass Saxophone, is set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and concerns a young fan of American jazz who encounters a Fellini-esque troop of musicians who recruit him to play the titular instrument (which I've never seen in person, and which is rare to the point of invisibility on all the records I've heard) during a concert for Germans only. Unpacking Skvorecky's love of long, intricately assembled sentences takes a little effort, but both stories are worth the effort. The Bass Saxophone, especially, does a great job of mixing the oppressions of the Nazis with hints of the same by the Communists and plenty of dreams of an America expressed exclusively in its musical creativity.
• 
  David Ellis

  Two novellas, the title one being a curious story of a young man called in to play saxophone in a slightly surreal jazz band, for an audience of German officers in occupied Czechoslovakia. The other, "Emöke", is about a young philosopher who falls in love with a beautiful but distant young woman at a vacation camp, and fights for her affections with an ignorant schoolteacher. Neither is very easy to read, due to the author's very long, meandering sentences, sometimes a page or more in length, which take a lot of concentration. There is an interesting foreword essay, "Red Music", on the role of jazz music under the Nazi and Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia.
• 
  Dale

  I really wanted to like this. Really, I wanted to. But alas, I did not. The best part was in the preface where he recited the rules of the Nazi dance bands and how they should attempt to substitute violoncellos for saxophones where ever possible. You can bet I played my horn for a bit after reading that.
• 
  Bruce

  Kerouac-y like prose but not adding up to enough
• 
  Donald Schopflocher

  Two novellas soaked with irony, surreal imagery, immediacy. Evokes the contradictory totalitarian horrors and musical escapes of Czech youth under the yoke first of Naziism, then of Communism.
• 
  Howard

  two novellas from Czech Josef Škvorecký - Emoke from 63 (set during Communist rule) and The Bass Saxophone from 67 (set during Nazi occupation) published by Ecco in 94. never read introductions before the main book but this time I should have as it's by Škvorecký himself, entitled 'Red Music', and it contextualises the next two works - oppressive regimes v artistic freedom, writing, jazz. Emoke is the stronger work - an insight into life at the time, set in a kind of state holiday camp. i had trouble distinguishing author from narrator here - liberal but seemingly conservative about sex? and of course how can we know what Škvorecký has included just to appease the state? tho the characters, dialogue and emotions really resonate - its a great piece. The Bass Saxophone starts very intriguingly but becomes repetitive and slightly grotesque - which may be intentional. in both novellas and the excellent introduction essay you will find all that classic plaintive jazz writing as well as the element of resisting oppression not with anger but resignation that it wont work but there's nothing else you can do
• 
  Patrick

  These two novellas illuminate two brief encounters with sympathy and humor. In the first, Emöke, the narrator describes a week-long visit to a sort of communist vacation camp, where he meets the titular character, a young woman with a sad background and a fervent belief in a better spiritual world, whom he briefly becomes close to before they are separated by the hard truths of circumstance and desire. In the second, the narrator is roped into playing with a concert ensemble of freaks for an-all German audience during WWII. In both, Škvorecký's elaborate sentences precisely detail complicated emotional and political situations, and how compassion can arise amongst, and perhaps change, very different people.
• 
  John Rey

  This book consists of two novellas.
  
  The first one is "Emoke". It has a potent message that I feel still very relevant one's exploration in faith, reason and love.
  
  The second novella is the "The Bass Saxophone". I think it is written in a stream of consciousness of the character. It feels like a cruise on someone's imagination connecting what one remembers of his past and relating it to his present situation where he encounters a band of musicians performing to a German audience in a Czech town during the reign of the Reich in Czech Republic. For me, it's still a hazy memory as I look back on this novella. It deserves a second reading to do justice on this piece.
• 
  Диляна Георгиева

  Шкорецки огъва езика като джаз импровизация с неочаквани синкопи, които очароват.
  Втората световна война през очите на един ариец и историите на неговите приятели евереи. Авторът опасно жонглира с читателската емоция, в лекотата на езика си в миг пробожда до кокал - буквално. Разказите преливат - различни - един в друг, водени от нишката на неизменния джем сешън с толкова тъжния глас на бассаксофона.
• 
  Drahcir10001

  Striking.
• 
  Katie

  While I didn't really enjoy reading this, I took a step back from my personal experience midway, and finally understood something about writing and reading and personality.
• 
  Martha Anne Toll

  Must read.
• 
  Tom Riordan

  This book has two short stories, I liked Emoke better. The second story, The Bass Saxophone was a little bit dreamy and surreal which made it hard for me to stay focused on it.
• 
  Alexandar

  Jazz against the machine.
• 
  Jan Moens

  7/10