Saxophone Sam and His Snazzy Jazz Band
Kindergarten-Grade 3-In a home filled with 1930s-style furnishings, a brother and sister hear music playing and search for the source. The music, shown in the form of small groups of curlicues and dashes, leads the children through the house to the attic, where they discover an old cathedral-style radio. Opening a little door in it, they find a jazz band of tiny musicians, singers, and dancers. The illustrations are innovative in their design and perspective. The musicians' presence is evident at first in a tiny triangle at the top of the page in which readers see a partial pair of dancing feet. On subsequent pages, as the youngsters move closer to the attic, the musicians' section of the page grows larger. When the children open the box and look down into the radio, readers look down onto the dancers from above; when they knock on the door, they see a whirling tangle of limbs and instruments. When the radio is opened, the scene is viewed entirely from the perspective of the musicians, who see two enormous children's heads looking in at them. The internally rhyming text gives readers an early hint about the illustrations' progress: "Watch us steal the stage as we overtake the page." The repetition of the curlicue-and-dash motif on the endpapers, furniture upholstery, bathroom towels, and rain outside the windows; the vibrant reds, yellows, purples, greens, and blues of the illustrations; and the elastic, elongated limbs of the dancers all add to the exuberant tone of this musical treasure hunt.Ginny Gustin, Sonoma County Library System, Santa Rosa, CACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.