Jack Kerouac’s Birthday today. We’ve been looking at Jack and Jazz all week. Here’s a rarely seen photo by Fred W McDarrah taken at the Artist’s Club, 73 Fourth Avenue (Fourth and Tenth Street), New York City, New Years Eve, 1958 -“Jack Sits In On The Drums” (tho’ whose legs are those on the left?) – Jack Sits In With the Drummer – not Roy Haynes (see our posting tomorrow) but… could it be.. Philly Joe Jones? – well, whoever it is, the bond and the sympatico is there.
“The thing with Jack and his era was, I don’t think jazz musicians ever accepted the Beats as insiders, and it’s a pity. Jack talks somewhere about a conversation he had with Philly Joe Jones, the drummer – he had encounters with these people – but I think he was very daunted by what they did. They were just total musical magicians..”
and the interviewer, Michael Goldberg, notes – “It’s interesting how bebop is happening while Jack is writing, and while he was living the stuff that he then wrote about, and then when he wrote about those times bebop influenced how he wrote.”
Meltzer again – “Well certainly it affected (him) but I don’t think that one-on-one you could say, oh this feels more like Wardell Gray than Illinois Jacquet you know. In general, sure. He was writing improvised prose.”
Plenty more Kerouac and Jazz in Kerouac on Record. We could note in passing Jim Burns and Larry Beckett‘s introductory essays, Marion Jago (on Lee Konitz), David Amram…
Clark Coolidge (another drummer!) has some wise words to say about the subject – see here
“Here’s a great line of Kerouac’s for long-line Bop sense: “Lester droopy porkpie hung his horn and blew bop lazy ideas inside jazz had everybody dreaming.” It’s almost too long for my breath but it’s there. The other thing about the long line, which is terrifying and wonderful, is that you never know where it goes. I mean, you’re following it for the sense of where, what’s going to drop in, what is that last word, where is it going to take me?”
“There’s also a convention in Bop for the quotation of other tunes. Charlie Parker did that a lot, and Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins. Which reminds me of Kerouac’s inclusion of things that happen to pop out in his memory which maybe didn’t have to do directly with what he was describing. Plucked from the great wellspring of forms in his composing head.”
Sam Charters 1982 Naropa lectures are another essential locus (see here, here and here)
(and here on The Allen Ginsberg Project)
“Jack Kerouac loved jazz with an intensity that most of us can’t even imagine. He tried to create what he called a jazz writing-style, a bop writing style, and his fine book of poems,
Mexico City Blues, he called that the session of a tenor saxophone blowing long lazy choruses of blues on the afternoon.”
Mexico City Blues, Allen was always fond of pointing out, was the book that turned Bob Dylan on to poetry.
Keith Chadwick writes on Jack Kerouac and Jazz – here
Listen to David Brent Johnson’s Jazz and Jack Kerouac – here
Sara Villa on Jack Kerouac’s Jazz Writings (part of Columbia’s 2009 Symposium -” Jack Kerouac’s Jazz – A Conversation” )
We’ll end, necessarily and fittingly, with some words from the man himself:
“…The children of the great bop innovators. Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful bop in the muds of New Orleans, even before him the mad tuba-players and trombone kings who’d paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime, on Bourbon, Dauphine and South Rampart and Perdido Street too. After which came swing, and Roy Eldridge vigorous and virile blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and natural tuneful reason – “I Want a Little Girl”, “I Got Rhythm”, a thousand choruses of “S’Wonderful” – leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, the dirty snow in late March, smoke from stovepipes. wool hats, pitiful brown mouths breathing vapor, faint noise of music from down the way – blowing his tied-together alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that Hot Lips Page and the rest – lost names in swinging Kaycee – nostalgia of alcohol, human mouths chewing and talking in smoky noise jazz rooms, yeah, yah, yeah. yah, last Sunday afternoon and the long red sunset, the lost girl, the spilt wine – Charlie Parker leaving home and unhappiness and coming to the Apple, and meeting mad Monk and madder Gillespie...Charlie Parker in his early days when he was out of his mind and walked in a circle while playing his horn.Younger than Lester, also from K.C., that gloomy sanity goof in whom the history of jazz is wrapped: Lester. Here were the children of the modern jazz night blowing their horns and instruments with belief; it was Lester who started it all, his fame and his smoothness, as lost as Maurice Chevalier in a stage-door poster – his drape, his dropping melancholic disposition in the sidewalk, in the door, his porkpie hat (“At sessions all over the country from Kansas City to the Apple and back to L.A. they called him Pork Pie because he’d wear that gone hat and blow in it.”). What door-standing influence has Dean gained from this cultural master of his generation?. What mysteries as well as masteries? What styles, sorrows, collars, the removal of collars, the removal of lapels, the crepe-sole shoes, the beauty goof – that sneer of Lester’s, that compassion for the dead, which Billie has too – Lady Day – those poor little musicians in Chicago, their love of Lester, early heroisms in a room, records of Lester, early Count, suits hanging in the closet, tanned evenings in the rosy ballroom, the great tenor solo in the shoeshine jukebox, you can hear Lester blow and he is the greatness of America in a single Negro musician – he is just like the river….Lester so, holding his horn high in Doctor Pepper chicken-shacks, back streets. Basie Jaycee wearing greasy smeared corduroy bigpants and in torn flat smoking jacket without straw, scuffle-up shoes, all slopey, Mother Hubbard, soft, pudding, and key-ring, early handkerchiefs, hands up, arms up, horn horizontal, shining dull in wood-brown whiskeyhouse with ammoniac urine from broken gut bottles around fecal pokey bowl and a gal sprawled in it legs in brown cotton stockings, bleeding at belted mouth, moaning “yes”, as Lester, horn placed, has started blowing,”blow for me mother, blow for me”, 1938, later, earlier, Miles is still on his daddy’s checkered knee, Louis only got twenty years behind him, and Lester blows all Kansas City to ecstasy and now Americans from coast to coast go mad, and fall by, and everybody’s picking up. Stranger flowers now more than ever, for as the Negro alto kid mused over everyone’s head with dignity, the slender blond kid from Curtis Street, Denver, jeans and studded belt and red shirt sucked on his mouthpiece while waiting for the others to finish; and when they did he started, and you had to look around to see where the new solo was coming from, for it came from his angelic smiling lips upon there mouthpiece and it was a soft sweet fairy-tale solo he played. A new kind of sound in the night, sweet, plaintive, cold; like cold jazz.Someone from South Main Street, or Market, or Canal, or Streetcar, he’s the sweet new alto blowing the tiny heartbreaking salute in the night which is coming, a beauteous and whistling horn, blown easily but fully in a soft flue of air, out comes the piercing thin lament completely softened, the New Sound, the prettiest. And the bass player: wiry redhead with wild eyes jabbing his hips at the fiddle with every driving slap, at hot moments his mouth hung open; behind him, driving, the sad-looking dissipated drummer, completely goofed, chewing gum, wide eyed, rocking the neck with that Reich kick, dropping bombs with his foot, urging balloons. The piano – a big husky Italian truck-driving kid with meaty hands and a burly and thoughtful joy; anybody start a fight with the band, he will step down; dropping huge chords like a Wolfean horse turding in the steamy Brooklyn winter morn….”