It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

Body and Soul by Frank Conroy

“Body and Soul” is a jazz standard and more – it’s a requirement for, at least, anyone who aspires to play sax in a jazz band. From what I’m told, “Body and Soul” is as basic and routine as a scale. If you can play the sax, you have played “Body and Soul”.

So it’s an important thing.

The book, Body and Soul, is about a musician: not a jazz musician, though he dabbles and likes to listen to jazz. And at no time are the words “body and soul” used in the book, except in the title. Go figure.

I guess there is an implication of “Body and Soul”, because this is a musician’s book, and I can’t imagine anyone not a musician getting caught up in the plot. And not just a casual musician, like me, but an accomplished musician, a student of music. Many of the conflicts, the sources of much of the tension, arise from situations the lay person couldn’t possibly relate to:

“Five or six bars in, Fredericks said, ‘Wait. Stop. Let me here is not legato. See if you can play it non legato’. Claude thought about it for a minute and began again, concentrating on the value of the notes . . .” (Chapter 6)

(On Charles Ives) “I guess it was a question of whether it’s a synthesis, a kind of prophetic use of dissonance as the only way to pull all the themes together and rise above them, or whether he’s thumbing his nose at us.” (Chapter 20)

“What happened was this: after having played the first four bars two beats G minor two beats C seventh…they suddenly found themselves ascending by half tones…It was so exciting, the apparent escape from tonality . . .” (Chapter 21)

Well, okay. Those aren't just isolated passages: there are pages and pages of stuff like that, where the dramatic tension is "Gosh, can he do it?", when few casual readers will understand what it is he has to do. My friend Vito might get excited reading this,but Conroy expects me to, and he has written way over my head – and I bet over most people’s heads.

There’s also a chapter in which a jazz musician cryptically hands Claude a cryptic note, and then cryptically drops dead in the Automat. The significance of the note is never made clear.

Body and Soul is a pretty long book – 447 pages, and it took me a month to read on the bus – and ultimately not worth the trip. The lack of comprehensible tension is made worse by the fact that Cklaude can do no wrong, that everything works for him, that he’s invincible. So why be interested? I’m not, any more. I was for a while, wondering when someone was going to play “Body and Soul”. The song.