The Jazz Master

In 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