The Jazz Master

front cover image for the jazz masterIn this evoca­tive and enter­tain­ing fic­tion­al mem­oir, nine­teen-year-old Dan Hen­nessey takes us on a jour­ney to the epi­cen­ter of the beat move­ment — San Fran­cis­co 1956, the year of Howl and The Dhar­ma Bums. As he gets swept up in the fer­vor of the San Fran­cis­co Renais­sance, he meets cul­tur­al icons such as Allen Gins­berg and Jack Ker­ouac, and spir­i­tu­al fig­ures like Alan Watts and Jid­du Krish­na­mur­ti, each of whom serves as a cat­a­lyst for his awak­en­ing. But the man who becomes his spir­i­tu­al and musi­cal men­tor, the man the poet Gary Sny­der called the jazz mas­ter, is a tenor sax­o­phon­ist, ex-Zen monk who teach­es him Zen through the art of jazz. Filled with reflec­tions on art, soci­ety, and spir­i­tu­al life, The Jazz Mas­ter is both a tale of spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing and a por­trait of a unique and col­or­ful era that paved the way for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes of the six­ties and seventies.

If you love spir­i­tu­al fic­tion, as I do, then you won’t want to miss The Jazz Mas­ter. It is beau­ti­ful­ly craft­ed, engag­ing and, above all, pro­found — a real spir­i­tu­al shot in the arm.

— Dada Nab­hani­ilanan­da, author of Close Your Eyes and Open Your Mind

The Jazz Mas­ter sam­ple chapters

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