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The message reaches Tony Cohan at his home in Mexico: "Your father fell again." It is a fateful summons--not only to attend to a vain, difficult, dying parent, but to reckon with his own keleidoscopic past. In 1950s Hollywood, Cohan's dad was a big-time radio producer and a backslapping pal of Jimmy Durante, Johnny Mercer, and Bing Crosby. But when radio's glamour evaporated, Cohan's father became an overnight nobody, his mother began drinking heavily, and young Tony, a budding jazz drummer, launched himself on a decades-long quest for artistic fulfillment and spiritual solace. It's a long, strange trip--from a Santa Barbara strip club pit band to the premier jazz clubs of Europe, from the jangling streets of Tangier to the Zen quietude of Kyoto, from sunny post-WWII optimism to the crazed depths of the psychedelic age--and Cohan chronicles it all with poetic grace, unwavering honesty, frequent humor, and hard-won wisdom. Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist--as a young man, as a grown son, and as a wandering soul finally coming to terms with self, family, and the elusive American idea of home.
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