“A graceful, acutely realized first novel . . . Schneider has the virtues you associate with a fine lyrical horn player: a good ear, immaculate rhythm, the ability to immerse himself without getting lost.”
—The Washington Post
“A stylish, lyrical narrative, told in a series of free-floating vignettes, that make you feel you’ve listened to a particularly rewarding set of notes, alternately gentle, mournful, erotic, and ecstatic. . . . The measured calmness and sure control of Schneider’s prose is the saving grace of the novel, turning the story into something truly memorable, soft and fine.”
—Salon
“With short, impressionistic chapters and syncopated prose, Schneider delicately breathes life into a particular time (the mid seventies) and place (post-Altamont San Francisco). He convinces us that celebrity, no matter how problematic, is one of life’s most tempting addictions.”
—People
“There is an essential poetry here that mirrors the music in these lives. . . . If Ronnie reminds you of Chet Baker, one of the tragic cases of modern jazz, it is intentional; however, this is not simply a fictional biography. . . .What Schneider has done is take an outline of the musician’s life and fleshed out a new work of art as a tribute to both Baker and jazz itself.”
—Chicago Tribune
“What makes Blue Bossa so readable is Schneider’s writing, his sympathy for his weak, talented man and his fragmented form. The book is a series of short takes, beginnings again—like songs on an album maybe, or isolated solos . . . this is the way a jazz musician plays.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A splendid story . . . a superb first novel . . . the writing is masterful, the subject is compelling—certainly to a jazz lover—and the pace is breathtaking.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
Bart Schneider’s tough-tender Blue Bossa is a real jazz novel, one that understands how dreams and despair can be heard in one beautiful, sorrowful note and survive in one body.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Blue Bossa is the best jazz novel since John Cellon Holmes’s The Horn, written forty years ago, but Ronnie Reboulet is more than a jazzman: the irresolvable contradictions of his life, the pushing and pulling in opposite directions, speak to all of us and give his story its irresistibly melancholy soul.”
—Booklist
“With grace and dexterity, Schneider cuts to the heart of the matter, his characters’ losses and redemptions, outlining their lives in deceptively simple terms . . . [in] this coolly passionate debut.”
—Publishers Weekly
(Finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize)
“Blue Bossa is an improbably lovely novel about a jazz musician on the skids, where they frequently are, and his recovery as an artist. There hasn’t been anything like it since John Cellon Holmes. The prose is so graceful that you also hear the actual music in your mind.”
—Jim Harrison
“In Blue Bossa, Bart Schneider has constructed an ambitious novel in which the main character's experiences are set against an expansive backdrop -- nothing less than the history of jazz in America.”
—New York Times Book Review
[A sweet, lyrical first novel which . . . plays a familiar tune with accuracy, timing, and taste. . . . [Schneider] captures, in the rhythms of his prose as much in anything else, not only the texture of the jazz life, but something of the ineffable quality of the music, a feat often attempted and rarely achieved.”
-New York Newsday
“Blue Bossa’s portrait of broken-down trumpeter Ronnie Reboulet—and his tentative emotional and professional comeback—is so sure-footed that it hardly feels like a
debut. . . . Reboulet’s tesume is filched from Chet Baker’s, but he also has in him some of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, and a bit of every middle-aged man who has ever found his circumstances at odds with his talent and dreams. To say that Schneider has a good command of language would be an understatement; his book offers perfectly realized prose, as lyrical as it is streamlined.”
—Time Out New York