A Glimpse of Stocking: A Novel

Product Information

While Fitzgerald’s singing of Cole Porter may not represent the most adventurous of jazz interpretations, she was taking me one step closer to the furnace; and from there, it was a hop, skip and a jump to Billie Holliday, Miles Davis and John Coltrane – those inner circles where earthly bounds are briefly shed through some magical combination of passion, honesty and competence—at two in the morning before an audience of loners and aficionados. I understand that the page count allows for deeper character development, but the piece of literature would be better without any filler. The scenery is very descriptive - enough to make me want to drive along Mulholland Drive when I was in L.

Naturally, like all youthful “discoveries”, this one had an element of self-confirmation (adolescent alienation being that feeling which immediately precedes the unanticipated encounter with spiritual kin.The manner in which she brings these experiences and feelings to Porter’s songs is at the heart of jazz interpretation – and it is an enticement for young listeners to go in pursuit of their own experiences. Older fans will find some of the new material entertaining; recent converts should consider signing up to that mailing list. Hardened, remote, mysterious, Bogart in many ways represented a persona antithetical to Porter’s smooth, erudite glamour; but for my father, Bogart was just another version of urban style.

Neither played an instrument, neither sang out loud, and neither listened to the radio with frequency. To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation. In short, Porter’s lyrical Baedekermapped out a world even more intriguingly different from mine than The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (NBC 1974).It took about a month because it's long and I let myself get sidelined by other books along the way. That in the midst of the 1970s, my father still enjoyed losing himself for the afternoon at Rick’s Café Americain, was an unspoken confirmation that an enviable world lay somewhere else.