Continuing a jazz week on the Allen Ginsberg Project and in preparation for Jack Kerouac‘s birthday tomorrow, we couldn’t avoid posting this one – “The Beginning of Bop” (first published in Escapade, April 1959, and recorded for the 1960 album “Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation” (later collected in the book Good Blonde & Others)
Kerouac writes:
Bop began with jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940 Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking down past a men’s clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A, and from the loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild and possible mistake in jazz that could have only been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop. The name derives from an accident. America was named after an Italian explorer and not after an Indian king. Lionel Hampton had made a record called Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop and everybody yelled it and it was when Lionel would jump in the audience and wail his saxophone at everybody, with sweat, claps, jumping fools in the aisles, while the drummer vastly booming and belaboring on his stage, the whole theater rocked. Sung by Helen Humes it was a popular record and sold many copies around 1945 or ’46. First everyone looked around and then it happened – bop happened – the bird
flew in – minds went in – on the streets thousands of new type hepcats in red shirts and some goatees and strange queerlooking cowboys from the West with boots and belts, and the girls began to disappear from the street somehow. You no longer saw as in the Thirties the wrangler walking with his doll in the honkytonk, now he was alone, rebop, bop, came into being because the girls were leaving the guys and going off to be middleclass models or something. And Dizzy or Charlie or Thelonious was walking down the street, heard a noise, a sound, half Lester Young, half raw-rainy-fog, that had that chest-shivering excitement of shack, or track, or empty lot, the sudden vast Tiger head on the woodfence rainy no-school Saturday morning dump yards, “Hey!” and rushed off dancing..
On the piano that night Thelonious introduced a wooden off-key note to everybody’s warmup notes. Minton’s Playhouse, evening starts, jam hours later, 10 p.m., colored bar and hotel next door, one or two white visitors, some from Columbia, some from Nowhere – some from ships – some from Army Navy Airforce Marines – some from Europe –
A strange note makes the trumpeter of the band lift an eyebrow. Dizzy is surprised for the first time that day. He puts the trumpet to lips and blows a wet blur –
“Hee hee hah!” laughs Charlie Parker, bending down to slap his ankle. He puts his alto to his mouth and says “didn’t I tell you?” – with jazz of notes… Talking eloquent like great poets of foreign languages singing in foreign countries with lyres, by seas, and no one understands because the language isn’t alive in the land yet – Bop is the language from America’s inevitable Africa, going is sounded like gong , Africa is the name of the flue and kick beat, off
to one side – the sudden squeak uninhibited that screams muffled at any moment from Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet – do anything you want – drawing the tune aside along another improvisation bridge with a reach-out tear of claws, like why be subtle and false?
The band at 10 p.m. Minton’s swings into action. Bird Parker who is only 18 years old has a crew cut of Africa looks impossible has perfect eyes and composures of the king when suddenly you stop and look at him in the subway and you can’t believe that bop is here to stay (or modern music, call it what you will) – but it is real, and that Negroes in America are just like us, we must look at them understanding the exact racial counterpart of what the man is – and figure it with histories and lost kings of immemorial tribes in jungle and Fellaheen town and otherwise and the sad mutts sleeping on old porches in Big Easonburg Woods where just 90 years ago, old Roost came running calling “Maw” through the fence he’d just deserted the Confederate Army and was running home for pone – and flies on watermelon porches. And educated judges in horn rimmed glasses reading the Amsterdam News.
And the band realized the goof of life that had made them be not only misplaced in a white nation but mis-noticed for what they really were and the goof they felt stirring and springing in their bellies, suddenly Dizzy spats his lips tight-drum together and drives a high screeching fantastic clear note that has everybody in the joint look up – and Bird, lips hanging dully to hear, is turning slowly in a circle waiting for Diz to swim through the wave of the tune in a tone-less complicated wave of his own grim like factories and atonal at any minute and the logic of the mad, the sock in his belly is sweet, the rock, zonga, monga, bang. – >In white creamed afternoons of blue Bird had leaned back dreamily in eternity as Dizzy outlined to him the importance of becoming Muslims in order to give a solid basis of race to their ceremony. “Make that rug swing, mother, – When you say race, bow your head and close your eyes.” and give them a religion no Uncle Tom Baptist – make them wearers of skull caps of respectable minarets in actual New York – picking hashi dates from their teeth – Give them new names with zonga sounds – make it weird.”
Now the tune they were playing was All the Things You Are…..they slowed it down and dragged behind it at half tempo dinosaur proportions – changed the placing of the
note in the middle of the harmony to an outer more precarious position where also its sense of not belonging was enhanced by the general atonality produced with everyone exteriorizing the tune’s harmony, the clonk of the millennial piano like anvils in Petrograd.- “Blow” said Diz, and Charlie Parker came in for his solo with a squeaky innocent cry.
Monk punched, anguished, nub fingers crawling at the keyboard tearing up foundations and guts of jazz from the big masterbox, to make Charlie Parker hear his cry and sigh – to jar the orchestra into vibrations – to elicit gloom from the doom of the black piano. He stared down wild eyed at his keys like a matador at the bull’s head. Groan. Drunken figures shaded in the weaving background, tottering – the boys didn’t care.
Because on cold corners, they stood three backs to one another, facing all the winds, bent – lips don’t care – miserable, cold, and broke – waiting like witch doctors – saying “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.” Like 12th century monks high in winter belfries of the Gothic Organ they wildeyed were listening to their own wild sound which was heralding in a new age of music that would eventually require symphonies, schools, centuries of technique, declines and falls of master-ripe styles, the Dixieland of Louis Armstrong sixteen in New Orleans and of big Pops’ Foster niggerlips Jim in the white shirt wailing at a big scarred bass in raunchy nongry New Orleans on South Rampart Street famous for parades and old Perdido Street – all that was mud in the river Mississippi, pasts of 1910 gold rings, derby hats of workers, – Soon enough it would leap and fill the gay Twenties like champagne in a glass, pop!- And crawl up to the Thirties with tired Rudy Vallées lamenting what Louis had laughed in the Twenties Transoceanic Jazz, sick and tired early Ethel Mermans, and old beat bed-springs creaking in that stormy weather blues when people lay in bed all day and moaned and had it good – The world of the United States was tired of being poor and low and gloomy in a line. Swing erupted as the Depression began to crack, it was the year marijuana was made illegal, 1937. Young teenagers took to the first restraint, the second, the third, some still wandered on hobo trains (lost boys of the ‘Thirties numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Salvation Armies put up full houses every night and some were ten years old) – teenagers, alienated from their parents who have suddenly returned to work and for good to get rid of that damn old mud of the river – and tear the rose vine off the porch – and paint the porch white, – and cut the trees down – and castrate the hedges – burn the leaves – build a wire fence- get up an antennae -listen – the alienated teenager in the 20th Century finally ripe, gone wild, modern to be rich and prosperous, no more just around the corner – became the hepcat, the jitterbug and smoked the new law weed. World War II gave everybody two pats of butter in the morning on a service tray, including your sister. Up from tired degrading swing, wondering what had happened between ’37 and ’45 and because the Army’d worked it canned it played it to the boys in North Africa, and raged it in Piccadilly bars and the Andrew Sisters put the corn in the can – Swing with its heroes died – and Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk who were hustled through the chow lines – came back remembering old goofs – and tried it again – and Zop! Dizzy screamed, Charlie squealed, Monk crashed,the drummer kicked, the bass questionmark plunked, and off they wailed on Salt Peanuts jumping like mad monkeys in the grey new air. “Hey Porkpie, Porkpie, Hey Porkpie!””Skidilidoop sau-tee-ah, sau-tee-ah,” They came to their own, they jumped, they had jazz and took it in their hands and saw its history vicissitudes, and developments and turned it to their weighty use and heavily carried it clanking like posts across the enormity of a new world philosophy and a new strange and crazy grace came over them, fell from the air free, they saw pity in the hole of heaven, hell in their hearts, Billie Holiday had rocks in her heart, Lester droopy pork pied hung his horn and blew bop lazy ideas inside jazz had everybody was dreaming.(Miles Davis leaning against the piano fingering his trumpet with a cigarette hand working
making raw iron sound like wood speaking in long sentences like Marcel Proust) – “Hey Jim,” and the stud come swinging down the street and says he’s real bent and he’s down and he has a twisted face, he works, he wails, he bops, he bangs, this man who was sent, stoned and stabbed is now down, bent and stretched-out. – he is home at last, his music is here to stay, his history has washed over us, his imperialistic kingdoms are coming.”
For more, we recommend Sam Charters erudite, informative talk, back in 1982, at Naropa’s
25th Anniversary of On The Road Jack Kerouac Conference – see here, here, and here
– Jack’s Jazz
and we’ll end with this classic recording – Jack reading from Mexico City Blues (Chorus 239-241) – genius describes genius – Jack Kerouac describes Charlie Parker