The Bear Comes Home
Page 64
Sam Holdsworth and Gordon Baird offered me the amazing hospitality of their magazine when I sent them the first chapter from Turkey for safekeeping; they printed it and serialized the creature for a year.
Many people read the manuscript and offered help and support. First among them was Brian Cullman, than whom few authors ever can have had so expert and sympathetic a reader. I incorporated most of his suggestions immediately; the rest I incorporated after awhile. Others who contributed time and wisdom were Daniel Furman, Salik Chalom, Sara Sterman, Eleanor Butler, Aaron Cass, Bulent Rauf, Mahmut Rauf, Kathryn Dunn, Jane Win-sor, Jacob Lampart, Barbara Pecarich, Maura Ellyn, Bibi Wein, Karen Bur-dick, Abdullah Giindogdu, Vic Garbarini and Jerome Reese.
The author is grateful for the generous, nay, crucial support of the New York Foundation of the Arts. And to Bruce and Susan Kovner, near the end, for shoveling me out of my Brooklyn bunker and flying me to the straits of Vancouver; as to Kate Wilson for prolonging this paradisal intermission: between them they saved the end of the book and made its central pair of lovers happy.
To Mary Cunnane for bringing me to Norton even before I had a bear in tow, and for persisting in her interest when he wandered off to brood for fourteen years; regret that she left as he reached home; gratitude that Gerald Howard was on hand to smooth the book's fur (and ruffle mine) at the finish.
Two brief memoria to close:
To the gifted young altoist Alain Tabar-Nouval, whom I heard and played with in Paris in 1966, and who died in a freak train accident en route to a festival in Oslo in 1969. His tone and, alas, embryonic style, I reaHzed as I went along, had evolved post mortem into a basis of the Bear's.
To Jim Schjeldahl, who was beaten by poHce and died, in New York, in 1995, in circumstances more innocent than those of Bobby Hatwell's beating—indeed, in circumstances that were entirely innocent. R.I.P. if you can manage it, and leave your enemies, as your friends, to God.
*tete4*'
(CONTINUED FROM FRONT FLAP) iftsid^th^-pJ'cioWyn iridge, where the Bear pUys a solo^ where .it all comes together for him, and blows him all the way back home.
Spectacularly witty and poignant, Rafi Zabor's prose, now jagged, now melodious, recalls at once the rhythm of the city streets and the improvisatory riffs of jazz. Lyrical, funny, wildly original. The Bear Comes Home provides the most realistic portrait of a jazz musician and the best novel, ursine or human, on the jazz life in decades.
RAFI ZABOR is a music journalist and occasional jazz drummer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
JACKET DESIGN BY CALVIN CKU
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: BEAR IMAGE FR A RAFI ZABOR
SAXOPHONE IMAGE BY MELISSA HAYDEN
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN BALDWIN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA