361: Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (USA)
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.

266: How to Speak Hip, by Del Close & John Brent

Del Close & John Brent (USA)
How to Speak Hip (1959/1961??*)
13 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Learning different languages is essentially essential in our globalised world; not only does it allow you to communicate with a wider number of people, but it also allows you to view life and the world from a different perspective – by expanding your vocabulary into different languages, it opens up entirely new emotional resonances.

To that end, today’s album is an instructional record. How to Speak Hip offers valuable guidance ‘for English-speaking people who want to talk to – and be understood by – jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.’ It is filled with language instruction and vocabulary building, as well as deeper dives into the wider culture, and we’re helped down this path by esteemed linguist Del Close and ‘actual hipster’ Geets Romo. Along the way, we discover the key differences between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool,’ learn how to properly identify the differences between ‘put ons,’ ‘put downs,’ ‘come ons,’ ‘come downs,’ and ‘bring downs,’ and really get to the bottom of the nuances inherent in the concept of ‘dig.’ We also learn about the hipster lifestyle on a series of field trips and exclusive access to a real hipster gathering to observe the spinning of a live riff or three. At the end of the journey, you should have all the starting tools to ‘convince a real hipster that hip is your language.’

Yes, this is a comedy record. It is devilishly funny and that it still holds up so well 60 years* after its first release is an amazing feat. Where a lot of the contemporary lampoons of hip culture really do seem naff and dated today, I think the reason that How to Speak Hip still works is that it is a lampoon made with love. Both Close and Brent were members of that same bohemian fringe, meaning that this album is comedy about hipsters, by hipsters and for hipsters – the joke is as much on straight society as it is the hip. In that way, it does actually offer a window into the hip scene in a ‘satire is a mirror’/‘many a true word is spoken in jest’ sort of way.

I consider How to Speak Hip to be one of the coolest records I own. Not only is it hilarious and eminently quotable (samples from this album show up in many unexpected musical surroundings, and I’ve slipped in Geets Romo quotes in lots of my professional writings too), it also has the feeling of being a real cultural artefact direct from one of the coolest subcultures of them all, just as much as a Charlie Parker record or a Beat novel.

Del Close and John Brent are laying down these riffs, and if you’re into jazz, hipsters or anything cool, you better pick up on it – let these cats hang you up. And above all: dig it.


* Time for me to get a bit nerdy about dates. This is a mystery I have yet to solve and I wonder whether it ever could be, if it’s even possible. Almost all sources – even bona fide academic texts – list the album as being released in 1959. 1959 was so important for jazz and it would stamp this album as being one of the many scene-defining works of that year. However, near the end of the album is a really short clip – just four seconds – of the solo from ‘We Free Kings’ by Roland Kirk…which was recorded in 1961. Therefore, in this particular state, How to Speak Hip couldn’t have been released in 1959. A few places, such as discogs or the British Library list the record as being from ‘1961?’ but those revisions only happened after I sent emails/comments to the same effect. So who knows when this is from? Not I. It doesn’t really matter. But it’s definitely a puzzle!

222: Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat, by Tim Key

Tim Key (United Kingdom)
Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat (2010)
30 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I honestly think Tim Key is one of the very funniest people around at the moment. I first encountered his work as part of the short-lived (three-episode) TV sketch show Cowards, and have been hooked on his work ever since. He seems to approach comedy from a different tack than everyone else. There’s not that many comedians that, for all their acting, writing and TV appearances would still have a legitimate claim for the primary title of poet. But Tim Key’s not exactly normal. So of course one of his most successful solo projects would be a comedy album in the old fashioned way, one made specifically for the listener rather than just a recording of a live show.

The album is ostensibly one of Key performing a collection of his poems to the backing of a string quartet. And it very much is that – there are 29 poems here, all performed in his impeccable manner and of varying length (although most are only a few seconds long, showing a genius and depth of storytelling in their brevity). But it’s so much more than that – in fact, the majority of the album comes after each poem has finished. Key interacts with the listener, instructing them on the premise of the album and how to listen to it, chats with the string quartet and deals with the increasingly frustrated Tom Basden (a.k.a. Lord, and fellow Coward), his usual musical accompanist ousted for the album. Another stroke of genius means that the tracks as presented are not in the order that they ‘happened,’ meaning you can only piece together the drama of it all by listening to it from beginning to end and making a mental jigsaw. In the end, then, Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat is a deliciously meta sitcom: the situation being the making of the very album you’re listening to.

This album is a great showcase for Key and his double-act with Basden, as it neatly distils Key’s humour and the dynamics of the pair: somehow both dark and silly, light-hearted and ridiculous but occasionally cruel. Above all it’s all absurd, abstract, intelligent and completely deadpan. There’s even an unexpected moment from Basden right near the end of the album in the form of ‘Lord’s Moment’, an incredibly poignant song that comes out of nowhere, but is appreciated all the same.

When I first came to Tim Key’s solo material, I did spend a while pondering, was he was an actual poet, or just pretending to be a poet? Can his works be described as poems? But really, what’s the point in wondering about it? When the end result is that he writes, performs and publishes his takes on poetry professionally, there’s very little difference either way. And when he somehow manages to come out with a record that is at once a collection of performed poems and a spoof of someone performing a collection of poems, you know that that line is always going to be – very deliberately – blurred.

205: How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1, recorded by Hans A. Traber

Hans A. Traber (Switzerland)
How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1 (1988)
32 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify

It’s my birthday! So as a treat to myself I’m actually picking today’s album rather than letting the robot decide, and I’ve gone for something a bit different.

It’s just a bunch of birds!

I love the sound of birdsong. I feel like it has a real restorative quality to it. When I lived in Berlin, a few times a year my job required me to be getting home at about 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning after a really long and intense day at work. To be walking home through the communal garden at that time to a complete cacophony of what sounded like hundreds of birds after a whole day of stress was like a beautiful massage for the mind, and I’d often just sit there with them for half an hour, letting the sounds bathe me before heading to bed. Now I live in London, and there are far fewer birds here. When I can, I cycle into the countryside to enjoy the quiet…and it’s interesting that the birdsong never intrudes into this quiet, it never registers as ‘noise.’ Those beautiful calls fill up my soul, ready to come back to the city and run on that as fuel.

And when that isn’t possible…that’s when Hans Traber’s work comes in. There are actually quite a few different recordings that I could have listed here (including extended Youtube videos of dawn choruses), but the variety of How Our Birds Sing is really lovely. The 32* birds recorded here are from Central Europe, so although most of them are the same as you’ll hear in the UK, including superstars such as the robin, the blackbird and the wren, there’s also a few that are more foreign to these shores, including the usually elusive nightingale.

It is truly lovely to sit and appreciate these recordings for the sounds they contain. Some are simple and short chirrups, squeaks and bleeps, others are virtuosic and long, taking wild and sometimes unpredictable turns while remaining reminiscent of human music. It’s mad when you think that it’s all basically small feathery things bellowing “fuck me” or “fuck off” isn’t it? At least they have the decency to be poetic about it.

I don’t know whether you’ll have the same reaction to these birds as I do. It may be because I’ve come from a rural area to a big and busy city; your mileage may vary. But whether or not you listen to this album, I urge you to get up (or, more fun, stay up) to see a dawn chorus every so often and revel in the sheer mastery of the bird world. Nature provides its own Good Albums, we only try our best to imitate it.

*There’s another 75 recordings across the other three volumes too!

102: The Best of Lord Buckley, by Lord Buckley

Lord Buckley (USA)
The Best of Lord Buckley (1963)
8 tracks, 51 minutes
Spotify • iTunes (both of those links are actually for a super-compilation of two albums, The Best of Lord Buckley and The Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat. Both are great, so dig in and dig it!

Lord Richard Myrle Buckley was a quintessential performer, an enduring hero of stand-up comedians and surely one of the coolest and maddest people ever to have hopped on this sweet swingin’ sphere. From working as an MC in the dance marathons and walkathons of the 1930s (a bizarre competitive spectacle that saw people dancing or just walking around a hall for sometimes days at a time), he honed all sorts of comedic talents that took him the length and breadth of the country, even owning one of the hottest clubs in Al Capone’s Chicago. One of his bits was to affect the manner of the English aristocracy – becoming Lord Buckley – and when he fell into the jazz crowd, he developed the language of the hipsters into his character and the persona was complete. He termed his unique turn-of-phrase the Hipsemantic.

It wasn’t just an act, he lived Lord Buckley. Not only did he always talk in Hipsemantic, but his home – wherever it was that week – was transformed into a palace with a constantly rotating cast of comedians, musicians, writers, sex workers, philosophers, dancers, drug dealers, anyone sufficiently groovy. Buckley would hold court among these friends and admirers, performing constantly.

For a man so constantly ‘on,’ it’s a shame there is such comparatively little material in circulation. In fact, the best collections of His Royal Hipness’ work were released after his death in 1960, and this compilation album helped solidify his enduring reputation as a genius in his field. It collects seven of the most well-known entries in to Buckley’s Hiparama of the Classics – retellings of classic tales in the Hipsemantic. It includes both word-for-word translations and hip tales of the lives of historical and Biblical figures. Of the former we get a hip Gettysburg Address and Marc Anthony’s Funeral Oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ becomes the wonderful ‘Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies, knock me your lobes;’ of the latter we hear the stories of Nero, Cabeza de Vaca (‘the Gasser’), Jonah and the whale, Gandhi (‘The Hip Gan’) and, most impressively ‘The Nazz’ – the story of three of Jesus’ most delicious miracles.

I could talk about Lord Buckley all day. It’s an effect that he has, even after so long, that seems to affect those that truly dig him – he seems to invite a sort of excessive fan. Perhaps it’s his uniqueness or the amount of off-the-wall stories from his life that range from the insane-yet-verifiable to the surely, surely mythical…or are they? If you’re interested in the life, times and work of Lord Buckley, I heartily recommend the book Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley by Oliver Trager. It’s a magnificent work of scholarship piecing together the Lord’s story through many interviews and recollections from those that knew him or were influenced by him, as well as some hardcore archive diving too. It’s a pretty rare book, but you will occasionally find a copy going for a reasonable price on eBay now and then. Immerse yourself in the world of Lord Buckley and become a member of his infinite, extra-temporal court of grooviness.

084: Why I'm not writing about Thriller, by Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson (USA)
Thriller (1982)
9 tracks, 42 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Well this timing is awkward. Just a few days before writing this one, a new documentary, Leaving Neverland, came out on Channel 4, which details pretty comprehensively the allegations of child sexual assault committed by Michael Jackson. To be honest, we knew for a long time. He was not a good man, and he has that in common with some others that will be on this blog at some point. His reputation deserves to be tarnished with this knowledge forever, but at the same time, his importance and contributions to the world of music is indisputable.

This is a really important time to think about the meaning of legacy, and how much we can continue to revere those of people that have directly caused such suffering. There is a case to say that, if the art isn’t connected with the transgressions of its creator, then it should be excused from being tarred along with the name. This is a flawed argument, especially when it comes to Michael Jackson. For starters, it is because of his music and the popularity, riches and fame that it brought, that gave him the means, the access and the trust of people that was required to abuse children in the way that he did. It doesn’t even work to say that the music itself is innocent of the crime, as the subjects are unrelated – listen to ‘Human Nature’ with this knowledge in mind and try not to be creeped out.

I’m not sure it’s appropriate to talk about this album from a musical perspective at the current time. You know what it sounds like, and you can go and listen to it if you don’t – no-one is stopping you. It’s a great album, but that is less important than the human cost that its success, in part, enabled. It hurts, because I would not have chosen this album to write about if I didn’t think it was worthy, and I didn’t enjoy listening to it. I am sure I will listen to it again, and I’m sure I will gain enjoyment out of that experience. But it isn’t appropriate to write about this album with veneration. Not now, at least.

It’s important that we believe survivors of assault and rape, and it’s important that we don’t let our biases or tastes get in the way of their personal justice.