The Best of Jackson Payne

Tenor saxman Jackson Payne's life reads like jazz tragedies' greatest hits, rife with drugs, sex, crime, violence and self-destruction, all vices and desires put to the service of jazz by the gifted and obsessed visionary. Readers may think they've already heard this story of addiction, race and passion, but Fuller's (Fragments) unflinching and searing novel tells it like never before. Narrator Charles Quinlan, a white, 40-year-old musicologist researching the life of the jazz icon in order to write Payne's biography, is also a man obsessed, neglecting his music students at the university, further alienating his ex-wife, even missing visitations with his children in his single-minded quest to glean the facts behind the legend, especially the events surrounding Payne's mysterious death. Though even his editor questions his need to delve ever deeper, Quinlan listens to the men who served with Payne in the Korean War, the women who shared his bed, the musicians who shared his love of hard bop and heroin, the daughter whose life he saved by giving up his own. The story unfolds in first person interviews, speculative flashbacks and traditional narrative form. If the characters are at first confusing, one quickly falls in step with Fuller's rhythm, grooving in mind and spirit as he keeps the story jumping like a hot sax solo. Quinlan's personal story is occasionally intrusive (an affair with a private investigator is superfluous) but the narrative device generally works and the story remains Payne's. Fuller, one-time editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, also wrote jazz criticism for the newspaper and his command of the scene, from Chicago to Harlem, is as evident as Payne's rejection of the diatonic scale. Fuller depicts Payne's demons and guardian angels, his desperation and inspiration, with pathos, compassion and seamy, reckless truths that will pull readers into his musical world. Agent, Gail Hochman. (June)