Nathaniel Mackey

Djbot Baghosthus's Run is the second volume of Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a jazz group known as the Mystic Horn Society. Djbot Baghosthus's Run is centered, in part, on the band's search for a new drummer. But this search, which begins with a revolution among the women of the group, and ends in a series of remarkable coincidences and eerie transcendental experiences, is also a search for everything that art (music and writing in this case) is and serves as an emblem for. Each letter spans an extraordinary range of voices and discourses, from philosophical to folkloric to erotic - with music always the connecting thread. Jazz for Mackey clearly is a cosmological and spiritual experience, on which signifies all those possibilities that lie beyond N.'s improvisations of a saxophone riff. At every level, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, and just plain gut, Djbot Baghosthus's Run is a masterwork of contemporary storytelling, a wonder that will haunt the emotions and arouse the intellect.

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