Richard J. Alley

An excellent read.

I am, by no means, familiar with jazz. Maybe just Frank Sinatra, of whom was mentioned only twice in this book. But that's not the point. The point is, while it is centered around jazz music, non-jazz lovers can also enjoy this book because the underlying theme is love; love for music, love for people, love for the life given to us. "Love", about which has been written for as long as humans came to be on Earth and yet it is still the one thing that we go back to. Coupled with the author's mastery of writing, this heartwarming story was born.

I'd recommend this to everyone!… (altro)

What a masterful story teller is Richard Alley! I enjoyed both the beauty of his story and the treasure of his words. "Five Night Stand" is about the last nights in the performance life of fictional jazz pianist, Oliver Pleasant. Oliver sets up a five night stand to close out his professional life in New York City. During those nights, his life intersects with several other people who are searching for answers in their own changing lives.
Along with Oliver, we meet Agnes, a young and talented pianist who is facing a fatal neuro-muscular disease, Frank, a middle aged reporter from Memphis, who is attempting to reinvent both his career and his marriage, and Pablo, Oliver's child neighbor who lost his father in the tower collapse of 9/11, and who wants the chance to find something that will help him forget. A quote from the book gives a clear picture of these four people whose lives intersect over the five nights.
"The diner is as bright and warm as it had been on Agnes's first morning in New York. Around the stained and chipped tabletop of the third booth from the back wall sits a disparate group of diners, a group of castaways adrift in their vinyl and Formica lifeboat. Trapped on this island of Manhattan is an old black man in a porkpie hat sitting beside a thin and dark-complected boy going to great pains to cut a sausage link with a butter knife. Across the table is a middle-aged man fingering his phone as he waits on a call, and next to him, a thin and pale young woman with her head resting in her open palm as she sips from a cup of coffee without taking it from her face. It's as though the steam is warming her as much as the diner's radiator heat and kitchen fires. They are four people as similar as they are unique--one at the end of his career, one lost in the middle, one who dreams of beginning, and the fourth, a child, not knowing what is ahead of him. None of them know for sure what awaits them; they're all discontent, all frightened for the future whether it be tomorrow, next year, or a decade away."
I enjoyed this book both for its excellent story and its beautiful words. The contrast and comparison of the characters is a powerful element to this story and will make this book interesting and appealing to most readers.
I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.… (altro)

3.5 stars

Before last year's 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, I don't think I had ever read a book centered around jazz music. Now we have Richard J. Alley's Five Night Stand, which revolves around the five-night farewell performance of jazz pianist Oliver Pleasant. Unsurprisingly, because Oliver is retiring after a career spanning seven decades, Alley's book has a more elegiac tone than Bertino's, which is both a good and a bad thing.

Oliver's long career gives Alley ample opportunity to explore the development of jazz from the 1930s on, and this history is interesting and edifying. That Oliver is black allows Alley to also address the impact of race, both with respect to the jazz form itself and as to its defining role in the lives of black musicians traveling through the Deep South from New Orleans to Harlem. Alley writes beautifully about music from the very first page:

"Back then [in 1935] he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won't."

As Alley writes, "Music, in all of its variations and venues, is the world's oldest social network," a point brought home by his decision to intertwine Oliver's life with two other main characters: Frank Severs, a Memphis journalist, and Agnes Cassady, a young jazz pianist from New Orleans. Frank and Agnes are both facing major life changes of their own, and Oliver and his music help each of them cope in their own ways.

I don't know if jazz musicians actually refer to their gigs as "stands," but the title of the book immediately brought to mind the sexual one-night stand, and there is a fair amount of (not very graphic) sex in Alley's story, including marital infidelity and promiscuity. While Alley generally incorporates these themes in a way which feels organic to the plot, his major misstep for me came from the relationship between Agnes and her benefactor Landon Throckmorton. Their bizarre encounters felt inauthentic and tacked-on, as though Alley suddenly decided his novel was insufficiently racy to catch the attention of a modern audience.

It was the book's pacing, however, which resulted in its 3.5 star rating. Although the plot takes place over a relatively short five days, we also move back and forth through each of the main characters' lives, and this causes the story to drag in places. Oliver's philosophical musings became repetitive to the extent that I was tempted to skim through some of his sections. His reflections, including their repetitive nature, are completely consistent with both his character and the narrative frame of a career-capping performance; nevertheless, I would have liked to feel a faster jazz rhythm throughout the entire book, not just in those scenes set in nightclubs:

"He's always liked this room, the size of it, the lights, the way his piano sounds when it comes back around to him. That sound of it leaves his fingertips and goes to the bar for a gin and tonic, takes a tour around the place to touch the pretty ladies on their bare backs, tingling their spines right between the shoulder blades before landing softly back on his ear."

Overall, I enjoyed meeting Oliver, Frank, and Agnes, and I look forward to seeing more of Alley's characters in the future.

I received a free copy of Five Night Stand through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.… (altro)

Some people live through music. It courses through them, leaking out their fingertips. They wrap their lives around it and it, in turn, drives their lives. So when it comes time to stand up from the keyboard or set down the trumpet, there is a poignancy and a sadness as if of grief. These freighted emotions pervade the whole of Richard J. Alley's novel, Five Night Stand.

Oliver Pleasant is in his eighties and his long and illustrious career is at an end. Drawn to the piano and the smoky, lush sounds of jazz from a young age, over his lifetime, Oliver has played with all the well known greats and is himself a jazz legend. His beloved wife is long since passed, he is estranged from his children, and it is time for him to retire down to Memphis to live with his niece for his remaining time. But before he goes, he is going to play one last five night stand at a local club in New York City and go out with a proper bow to the music that sustained and enriched him his entire life.

Frank Severs is a middle-aged freelance newspaper reporter from Memphis who idolizes Pleasant. Frank was laid off from his newspaper job, his novel in progress is collecting dust, and his marriage is so strained under the weight of fertility issues that it might not survive. When Frank hears about Oliver's final five night stand, he arranges to fly to New York to bear witness and hopefully write a saleable piece out of the experience.

Agnes Cassady is a Memphian like Frank and an amazingly talented pianist like Oliver. Only in her twenties, she suffers from a degenerative disease that is slowly robbing her of her ability to play the piano and ultimately of her life. She's traveled to New York in a last ditch effort to find a treatment that can arrest or possibly cure her disease and while she's there, she discovers that Oliver Pleasant is playing his farewell five night stand, a concert she must see.

The three characters are tied together by their mutual love of music, jazz in particular, and they connect over Oliver's final set of performances. Each of the characters comes into the story much like the band playing with Oliver comes on stage, one at a time, each of them riffing on their own before weaving into the larger tapestry of the story. Oliver, Frank, and Agnes all have extended and important back stories that are carried in their present and they are told seamlessly, another melody line in the overall composition. Each character carries sorrow deep within and the tone of the novel is melancholic. It is a little slow to start as the connections between the characters build towards their coming together. Regret and long held secrets infuse all three stories, creating an incredible depth of feeling here. The novel is very much like a jazz piece with the writing weaving in and out of separate stories that all come together to make one harmonious whole.… (altro)