LARRY STRAUSS, NOW'S THE TIME

Bellingham publisher Kearney Street Books and Village Books present a book launch event with music from the Jud Sherwood Quartet and a reading by LA-based author, Larry Strauss.  Join us as our Readings Gallery is transformed into a jazz club for this event.

A scream of metal on an icy road on a dark 1956 night, and all the promise of an up-and-coming jazz quintet vanishes.  Pianist Billy Heron lay dead on the very night he broke free of his own inhibitions and found his musical voice.  Twenty years later, a passing comment from a recovering drug dealer drives his daughter, trumpeter Didi Heron, into the relentless pursuit of the impossible – the vanished tape of her father’s very last session.  Here is a jazz journey in 4/4 time as Didi seeks out notable musicians of her father’s day and searches for the tape that could give her back a little piece of her father and extend his musical legacy.  At the same time she works to realize own dream of becoming a female jazz trumpeter in this male-dominated art.  Now’s the Time is fiction rooted in historical fact, a celebration of family ties and musical legacies. 

Larry Strauss, a former subway graffiti artist, stand-up comic, television writer, and corporate poet, is a jazz enthusiast who now makes a more conventional living as an English teacher and basketball coach in South Central Los Angeles, where he tries “to recruit boys out of materialism, violence, and despair and into the world of ideas.”  Strauss began his writing career penning episodes of popular animated show, Transformers.  He is also the author of a biography of Magic Johnson, and three novels, which have all been optioned for motion picture development.