The bass saxophone

the long version

Two novellas ("The Bass Saxophone" and "Emoke") by a banned Czech writer who won the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Canadian Governor General's 1985 Award for Fiction, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1982. The stories evoke the everyday nature of tyranny and the beleagurred individual's resistance to it. This novella has an autobiographical significance, for when he was sixteen or seventeen, Josef kvorecký played a tenor saxophone rather badly fora band called Red Music—modeled after a Prague group called Blue Music.He and his companions, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, did not know that in jazz, blue was not a color. Although the name itself had no political connotations, their music did, for jazz was condemned by the Nazis for being a creation of American black musicians and Jews.