“Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than
preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians
in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning
and our jazz.” —Kurt Vonnegut
While Kurt Vonnegut undoubtedly found his true calling as an
author, writing such classics as Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother
Night, Cat’s Cradle, and the short story collection Welcome to the
Monkey House, he once speculated about another potential career.
“What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a
jazz pianist,” Vonnegut said. “I mean jazz. I don’t mean rock and
roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black
people gave the world.”
The literary world can be thankful that Vonnegut stuck with the
typewriter rather than the piano, but on the occasion of the great
satirist’s 100th birthday, the pianist and composer Jason Yeager will
gift him the next best thing: a new suite of music inspired by Vonnegut’s
writings. On Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite, Yeager
presents eleven new compositions vibrantly capturing the incisive
wit and skewed vision of one