Description
Book SynopsisHubert Clements is a black cellist on tour with a symphony orchestra. Their guest soloist is injured and the conductor asks Clements to stand in. After wrestling with an extremely dif?cult passage in the performance piece, Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello, Clements ?nally resorts to improvising his way through the score, which earns him a stinging rebuke from the conductor, who disdainfully calls him Satchmo'.
Humiliated, Clements returns to his hotel room, where try as he might he cannot master the piece. Unwittingly invoking the ghost of Louis Armstrong, the highly mythologized spirit of the father of jazz himself, Satchmo' challenges Clements' prejudiced view of him as an amateur and an Uncle Tom. Gradually, the lives of the characters intertwine and begin to play off each other as issues of class, hope, courage, family and race emerge in a lively and powerful struggle between what we remember, and how we remember it. In the end, of course, the drama resolves with C
