Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)
9 tracks, 55 minutes (1990 CD version)
Spotify
Jazz music is brilliant, a boundlessly creative form that exists to push the boundaries of what’s possible, its musicians exploring the outer wilds of rhythm and harmony and creating some of the catchiest and most exciting melodies to go around them, even off the top of their heads.
Jazz isn’t just music, though. Jazz is a whole world of art and attitude. Painting, architecture, graphic design, photography, dance, pornography, journalism and fashion can all be jazz. It can also be the way you receive things, you can hear something with a jazz ear or see it with a jazz eye or behold it with a jazz brain. Conversation can be jazz. I’m not really sure how, but I’m pretty sure there can be jazz in food, too – if anyone knows any hip chefs who can help me confirm, that would be very useful. There is a whole world of jazz that is solidly in the realm of not-music. We’ve heard non-musical jazz on this blog before, and much like the monologues of Lord Buckley or the comedy of How to Speak Hip, Jack Kerouac’s writing is jazz.
Kerouac thought in jazz. The way he describes scenes in his novels are so lush and full of passion – whether that is a positive or negative passion – and when he describes actions it is as if they have been filtered through centuries of poetry. My favourite part of his writing, though, is when he gets on a riff. Kerouac’s riffs can be on anything, from the aforementioned scene-setting to thoughts on philosophy or culture or the taste of food. You can feel the text building up a pace as his thoughts tumble over each other. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness, but in a way that has been keenly honed. Thought threads come and go but never seem random, rhythms are developed and dissipate and the rules of grammar are bent and broken in a way that only serves to increase the beauty of the riff without losing any of its intelligibility. That’s right: Kerouac wrote in jazz solo.
The most potent example of this for me comes on this album of Kerouac performing his work – poetry and excerpts of his novels – completely solo. ‘The Beginning of Bop’ (later retitled ‘Fantasy: The Early History of Bop’) was originally an essay written for a gentleman’s magazine in 1959, but becomes another beast when he performs it out loud. It’s an 11-minute flight into the formative moments of bebop that never quite existed. It’s a stunning listen, and incredibly hypnotic. Kerouac bends his words into an almighty groove, his smooth, smoky voice and heavy Massachusetts accent giving the written words a rhythm so palpable you could play drums to it. The story he spins is compelling, too, musing on the meanings and deeper religious, philosophical and nostalgic bases of the music as well as its sounds and cultural impacts. I first listened to this recording sitting in a beautiful, empty church, followed that evening by a small but feverish obsession whereby I transcribed the whole of that recording as I heard it, pen-on-paper across five A4 sheets. I felt desperate to imbibe the words into myself, and I’m still glad I did that. It’s as if I solidified my own experience and connection to this amazing work.
Jack Kerouac is probably the most well-known of the movement known as the Beat Generation – he came up with the term himself, after all – and his semi-autobiographical book On The Road is regarded as one of the Great American Novels. It’s even more impressive when you consider that English wasn’t even his first language. For me, Kerouac is also one of the most defining voices in the non-musical world of jazz. His words can sing you to another place – listen to this album and let him read you there.
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