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March 18, 2009 · 8 comments
Jack Kerouac and Jazz
For better or worse, the leaders of the Beat Generation, and especially Jack Kerouac, are inextricably linked in the public's mind to the jazz world. Yet what was the real connection between Kerouac and jazz? Jazz.coms Jared Pauley reports on a symposium at Columbia University that addressed this very issue. T.G.
The 1950s were a very interesting time for jazz. Culturally there was change in the air with an entire generation living under the umbrella of the Cold War, finding different and new ways to express themselves through story, music, and poetry. The Beat Generation had long had an association with jazz particularly in New York City. The Beats wrote about the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie with passion and delight but what was the real association between the Beat Generation and jazz musicians? In particular, where does Jack Kerouac rank in the critical history of jazz? Perhaps not all of these questions have been answered for me, but I recently gained a deeper knowledge and appreciation for Mr. Kerouac.
On Tuesday March 10th at Philosophy Hall, Columbia University held a symposium on the jazz writing of Jack Kerouac and his involvement in the motion picture Pull My Daisy. The setting was an appropriate one, since Kerouac attended Columbia University on a football scholarship. Participating on this panel were record producer George Avakian, musician David Amram, Columbia professor John Szwed, and Italian scholar Sarah Villa who has translated some of Kerouacs unpublished writings on jazz into Italian. After a brief introduction by Dr. George Lewis, the head of Columbias Center for Jazz Studies, the seminar began with a look at some of Kerouacs unpublished critical writings on jazz.
The heart of the seminar revolved around Kerouacs participation in the movie Pull My Daisy, in which David Amram also made an appearance along with poet Allan Ginsberg. Here is where my biases come straight to the surface regarding the way in which the seminar was conducted. I am product of Rutgers University and the Institute of Jazz Studies roundtable discussions, where interaction among the audience and speakers is almost a prerequisite. Dont get me wrong, I have a strong appreciation for New Jazz Studies, but many of the people in attendance would have taken anything that was said at face value.
Is this the future of jazz in modern academia? Has the music has taken a back seat to cultural analysis? One could argue that yes, this is the future of jazz in academia because this tendency has already been in place for the last twenty years. But where should musicians who have chosen to cover music do so in the midst of New Jazz Studies? If not for the involvement of David Amram in this seminar on Kerouac, the average person would have been lost as to where the conversation was headed in regards to the Beat authors involvement other than via unpublished jazz essays.
Now, Sarah Villa gave some wonderful insight into the Jack Kerouac essay The Beginning of Bebop, which was published in Escapade in October 1959. Her doctoral work at the University of Milan and at Columbia explored the critical response to Kerouacs writings on jazz. Some of the responses were actually flattering while others were more disdainful. Overall, she provided a nice insight into things about Kerouacs life and writing that I wasnt aware of. More importantly, Kerouacs piece in Escapade showed that Kerouac did actually have music analysis in him. The excerpts that were shown during her PowerPoint presentation surprised me with regards to how in depth Kerouacs listening skills as a non-musician were.
Leading up to the analysis of Pull My Daisy, I was curious as to how the seminar was going to evolve. It ended being the David Amram musical hour pretty much, which was nice but a little redundant. He spoke at length about his participation with Jack Kerouac at the Five Spot in 1957 when the two first started to fuse spoken word with jazz. Kerouac also performed at the Brata Art Gallery in December of 1959 on East 10th Street in NYC, another fact I wasnt aware of. The movie Pull My Daisy featured a plethora of different Beats and David Amram described the making of the movie with vivid detail. This quote below describes the process Kerouac went through for recording his narrations for the film: according to Amram, He watched the film and made up the narration on the spot. He did it two times through spontaneously and that was it. He refused to do it again. He believed in spontaneity and the narration turned out to be the best part of the film.
I figured Kerouac was into being spontaneous but I wasnt aware at how much his mentality was like that of an improvising jazz musician. Take it for what you will, but I was delighted to learn of these different attributes. Kerouacs work has always intrigued me, as has the participation of the Beatniks in jazz, but this seminar did give some great detail from people who were there and knew him personally.
In the end, the roundtable was informative but everything was a touch too romanticized for mebut I should have known better. I get the feeling that there werent many musicians present at this symposium, but I still gained a greater and deeper understanding of Jack Kerouacs participation in 1950s jazz and how important his role was. The Center for Jazz Studies really has a lot of potential, I just wish they would be more specific and focus more on the music; but lets give Columbia a chance and find out more of where they are taking their particular brand of New Jazz Studies.
And on a closing note, I think it defeats the purpose of having a wonderful, I repeat, wonderful person like George Avakian on the board, yet he only gets to say three or four sentences at the beginning of the seminar. I have learned more from that man in our short conversations than I have from reading entire books. Just food for thought . . . but come on, Avakian is a walking jazz history book. For those interested Columbia Universitys next symposium will feature Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal discussing Miles Davis and his music in 1969 on Monday April 6th at 8:00 p.m. in Philosophy Hall. Should be interesting to see where this one goes. Ill be there.
This blog entry posted by Jared Pauley.
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Anyone open to a more critical take on Jack Kerouac might be interested in my jazz.com review of "Congo Blues" here: /music/2008/5/15/red-norvo-congo-blues
Also, for the record, Escalade is a luxury SUV made by General Motors and sold under the Cadillac brand. Jack Kerouac's slapdash 2000-word essay "The Beginning of Bop," on the other hand, first appeared in Escapade, a 50 girlie magazine, in April 1959. In it, Kerouac shamelessly flaunts his ignorance of jazz by, among other things, misplacing an 18-year-old Charley [sic] Parker at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, when according to Dizzy Gillespie (who was in a position to know), Parker never worked at Minton's and did not become a part of the nascent bop scene until 1942, when Bird was 22.
And did anyone at Columbia University bother to mention Kerouac's racism? At one point in "The Beginning of Bop," Jack has Dizzy screaming, Monk crashing and "Charley" squealing, as "off they whaled [sic] on Salt Peanuts jumping like mad monkeys in the gray new air." Even more repugnant is his reference to "big Pops Forest niggerlips jim in the white shirt whaling at a big scarred bass in raunchy nongry New Orleans." Apart from getting the man's name wrong as usualit was Pops Fostersuch odious language ought to have been unacceptable even in a 50 girlie mag.
In fact, upon further reflection, a 50 girlie mag was too dignified a forum for Joke Bivouac. The slipshod writings of a bigoted, know-nothing jerk were beneath even the negligible decorum of one-handed readers.
I totally wrote Escalade instead of Escapade. Thanks for the correction Alan.
It's pretty easy to take shots at Jack Kerouac's "racism" if using today's standards to evaluate behavior in the late 40s/50s. Brown v. Board of Education wasn't even decided until 1954. In fact, Jack may have been ahead of his time when it came to matters of race. Did he use what appears to be racist language? Yes. Was he a bigot? I highly doubt it.
Rick, you're giving Kerouac an undeserved free pass. He penned the racist passages quoted above in 1959, twelve years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line, eleven years after President Truman integrated the U.S. Armed Services, five years after Brown v. Board of Education, fours years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, and two years after the federally enforced desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School. Face it, Rick. Judged by the standards of 1959 (not 2009), the Godfather of Beat walked the walk and quacked the quack of a know-nothing bigot.
I think Kerouac was writing the lines for his racist white friends or other parts of society. Yeah it was 1959 - but racism is still around today, even if its not allowed. I agree that what struck me the first time I read this essay was how racist the tones were - How was Bop the music of Africa, when black Americans had already proven themselves to be the masters of blues and earlier jazz? I thought we'd already got through those Black questions by sharing music. I had to give it some reflection and question why he was saying it. I think that the essay was written for an audience that didnt know music or go inside music clubs. I thought 'How could he possibly have been racist?' - I assumed him to be cleverer than that, and that his agenda was to speak as a white poet, to an innocent reader, and maybe even just the sheltered middle class teenage girl for the magazine. More than anything those lines are an attempt to grab the reader and engender a response or reaction, and that was central to his writing style. The Beat poets thought they were being smart with this emotional technique. With an ego the size of his, Kerouac was being cheeky rather than mean, and using his creative vocabulary to create a piece of beat writing that was meant to echo the sound of Bop music, challenging you on a tangent of racism to bring you round to the new style of the mainstream jazz music. Beat was a creative experiential writing that ran alongside gonzo-journalism. Unlike gonzo, it sought to put you into the story and shake you around with words of meaning. This was not a news music review style without colorful vocabulary, Kerouac did it because he thought he could - and that he was in control of the power of his pen. He probably felt responsible for writing a new generation, and that he needed to go there to cover all sorts of reactions to Black music and people in order to make change. You could even congratulate him for trying to reach a new audience of people that were racist, and taking them on a listening journey. He could have stayed elite and only spoken to the enlightened ones of the arts and music crowd. I think he was writing for the youth of a new world, and not the racism of the old.
Alicia, like our earlier respondent Rick, you're letting Kerouac off the hook too easily. You're right that "the essay was written for an audience that didn't know music," but you misunderstand the term girlie magazine. Trust me, Kerouac's readers did not include "sheltered middleclass teenage girls," although such hotties were no doubt fantasized by the horny wankers who did plunk down 50 for Escapade. Moreover, your assumption of Kerouac's cleverness is as unjustified as your calling him a "white poet." He was neither clever nor a poet.
And he was certainly not challenging anyone "on a tangent of racism to bring you round to the new style of the mainstream jazz music." His essay "The Beginning of Bop" is about just that: the origins of bebop. By 1959, bop was a new style only if you'd been brain dead for the last decade and a half. (Come to think of it, that's a pretty fair description of the Beats.) And your timeline is off. Beat did not run alongside gonzo-journalism, it was a predecessor.
Plus you misrepresent Kerouac's literary options in 1959. "He could have stayed elite," you write, "and only spoken to the enlightened ones of the arts and music crowd." In fact, Kerouac was scorned by the literary elite. Truman Capote famously skewered Jack's marathon bennies-&-scroll writing method with his bitchiest one-liner: "That's not writing, that's typing." In doing so, Capote actually gave Kerouac too much credit. On the Road, written in 1951, was rejected by one New York publisher after another, and saw the light of day in 1957 only after editor Malcolm Cowley's massive salvage job. Such unmediated prose as "The Beginning of Bop" shows Kerouac to be as sloppy a typist as he was a writer.
In any case, Jack Kerouac in 1959 was not writing for a 50 girlie magazine because he was a brave visionary trying, as you propose, "to reach a new audience of people that were racist." He was a washed-up bohemian trying to cadge a few bucks from the only sleazy outlet that would publish his addled meanderings.
thanks for correcting me about the mag. I did think he was trying to talk to racists. Um, I think by speaking to the magazine clientele he was trying get to dirty old stupid men and speak to him with that emotional language. It works the same as when I said that I thought the magazine was for teenage girls. I think Kerouac thought of his audience and was not speaking to his 'elite' poet friends. By elite I meant the 'hipsters' that the Beats thought they were. I realise that they werent always considered literary. I thought that he did have a point and tried to read the color of the writing. You get me wrong, I dont love Kerouac. I think he's a bore, and a bit of a poser at times. I do think he was trying to write something colorful, clever and take you on a ride. I thought that he wanted to slap people in face who may have thought those things of Black musicians, and make them take notice for the first time. If you want to rip Kerouac apart, just use any example of his writing. It would be too easy to suggest he is just racist from this writing, there is more in it than that. Thanks I agree, I do now see him as a writer who was trying to earn a buck any way he can. I dont really find fault that for the time (though would hold it against a writer from this day). Hey, I am no Kerouac champion - I cant even read his work. Sometimes, these forum messages seem silly when you end up correcting so much like this, but YES Beat did come before Gonzo I think I just wrote it messily. I actually meant that the style of writing wanted to create a sense of taking the audience with the writer, and making them feel some sort of emotion. Did Kerouac ever answer to questions about this piece?
"I walked through black part of Denver wishing I was Black. Knowing what the white world offered was not enough joy, kicks, night." Jack also wrote The Subterraneans about his interracial relationship. He may have developed Conservative views later in life - in fear of the way he was being BLAMED for every bad aspect of countercultural revolution. However, how many writers would have the guts back in the 1940s and 1950s to write The Subterraneans or refuse to edit out the passage I quoted from On The Road.