This novel completes a trilogy (including Train Whistle Guitar, Northeastern Univ. Pr., 1989, and The Spyglass Tree, Pantheon, 1991) that documents the education of a young black man. Upon graduation from college in the 1920s, Scooter becomes the bass player in a celebrated jazz band and proceeds through another stage of development. Section 1 ("The Apprentice") celebrates the camaraderie and inventiveness of accomplished musicians as they travel by bus throughout the country. In section 2 ("The Journeyman"), Scooter leaves the band to write music in Hollywood for the movies, and in section 3 ("The Craftsman"), he explores the expatriate culture of France. Throughout, Scooter's professional and sexual conquests seem so effortless that the novel lacks tension. Murray recounts numerous episodes but provides little plot; he includes hundreds of people but develops few engaging characters. For larger public libraries. [For a starred review of Murray's latest nonfiction, The Blue Devils of Nada, see p. 111.‘Ed.]‘Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The young black hero of Murray's Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree comes of age in this ambitious and vibrant conclusion to the trilogy, set in the 1920s. Here, Scooter has been nicknamed Schoolboy, for his new college degree. A talented bass player, Schoolboy is called to join the ensemble led by the legendary and innovative Bossman. A series of one-night stands eventually takes the band to L.A. for an extended stay. Although promised to a girl back home, Schoolboy acquires two lovers there. The first, Gayneele Whitlow, an ``old down home broad,'' is a familiar fixture to the band; but it is for movie star Jewel Templeton that he takes a leave from the band. Though new to the jazz scene, Jewel becomes Schoolboy's patron, offering her home, her staff and herself in exchange for a foothold in the jazz world that fascinates her. Studio sessions and club dates keep Schoolboy busy, but the itch to be on the road returns. Even so, Jewel takes him abroad to experience Europe; it is only by leaving that continent, and her, that he learns what to come home to. Murray faithfully evokes the world of early black jazz here-as much through his prose, which soars, glides and hops in an energetic rush, as through his richly detailed evocations of various cities and landmark sites. Keenly observant and intensely curious, Schoolboy makes an engaging narrator, completing a story that, after three volumes, is as vital as the period in black American history that it evokes so well. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An overlooked genius, Murray is at his scintillating best in his new set of essays and latest novel, two books that may finally earn him the recognition he so richly deserves. In The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray presents invigorating interpretations of music, visual art, and literature dearest to his heart. Murray explains that art is "indispensable to human existence" because it brings form and grace to the chaos that is life. Murray discusses the personalities and work of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, painter and collagist extraordinaire Romare Bearden, and Ernest Hemingway, whom Murray characterizes as a "man of active goodwill" and a truly great, often misunderstood writer. Murray believes that the work of these world-changing artists is firmly rooted in the blues idiom, and that the blues are all about "affirmation in the face of adversity, and improvisation in situations of disruption and discontinuity." Murray's own aesthetics involve the extension, elaboration, and refinement of the blues idiom, as well as a commitment to discipline, elegance, and self-realization. These aesthetic values are the leitmotif of Murray's fiction, especially the trilogy of novels featuring his bright-eyed, brown-skinned hero, Scooter. We first meet Scooter as a child in Train Whistle Guitar (1989), then watch him come of age in The Spyglass Tree (1991), and now stride with him into brilliant manhood in The Seven League Boots, Murray's most ambitious novel to date. Scooter has just finished college and secured a fellowship for graduate school when his virtuosity on the bass fiddle catches the attention of the reigning jazz pianist, the Bossman Himself, and Scooter finds himself postponing his studies to hit the road with the Bossman's band. His fellow musicians call him Schoolboy, but he's also dubbed "Seven League Boots" after they hear him "walk" the bass. This allusion to magical powers affirms Scooter's status as a classical hero, although he faces no obvious monsters or evil seductresses. Instead, the world opens for him like the sea for Moses, but such spectacular success has its own pitfalls, and Scooter's tricky journey requires much improvisation, openness to adventure, and a deep desire for knowledge and understanding, traits Murray enshrines as nothing less than heroic, and absolutely essential to fulfilling one's "ancestral imperative" to achieve one's personal best. Scooter's story is infused with the elegant energy of jazz, the sonority of history, and the spirituality of art. --Donna Seaman