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Intermission by Owen Martell: book review

 




Intermission (2013, French edition) is set in New York in 1961. 

 

In June 1961, The Bill Evans Trio band is booked to perform in a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard in New York. 

 

The Bill Evans Trio is a real jazz band established in the 1959 by pianist and composer William (Bill) Evans (1929-1980), with double bass player Scott LaFaro (1936-1961) and drummer Paul Motlan (1931-2011).

 

In 1961, Bill is 32 years old, Scott is 25, and Paul is 30. At the Village Vanguard jazz club, they recorded two albums, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. The band was sensationally successful. In Bill’s lifetime, he has 31 Grammy nominations and 7 Awards for his tunes. 

 

In 1961, ten days after the shows finished, Scott LaFaro died in a car accident, devastating Bill Evans who went into seclusion for months before emerging with  a new bass player Chuck Israels (1936-). 

 

Intermission is the re-imagined story of the period between Scott’s death and Bill’s emergence. 

 

The fictional account of one of America’s greatest jazz composers explores the artist, the tragedy, his grief, and his life ‘lost’ in seclusion, away from family, friends, music, and society.

 

The novel, by Welsh author Owen Martell, takes four points of view, surrounding Bill Evans: 1) brother Harry who used to play music with Bill, 2) mother Mary who taught Bill to play the piano, 3) father Harry Senior, and 4) Bill. These perspectives are skilfully woven around a piece of music as everyone tries to ocme to terms with Bill’s erratic behaviour and his extreme mental pain. 

 

The novel is difficult to understand in parts, and interesting in other parts, particularly the American jazz scene of the Sixties, but underneath it all it is the reflective writing of mental processing and coming out the other side. 










 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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