This assignment is a follow-up to the reading of the NEA Essay about jazz and modernism. Please review the essay here.
The
Beat writers and poets of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg, were strongly influenced by bebop musicians. Jack Kerouac, in books
such as On the Road, attempted to adapt the rhythms and improvisation of bebop
to prose. In a 1968 interview, poet Allen Ginsberg said that Kerouac “learned
his line ... directly from Charlie Parker and Gillespie and Monk. He was
listening to Gillespie’s ‘Symphony Sid’ and ‘Night in Tunisia’ and all the
Bird–flight–noted things which he then adapted to prose line.” Ginsberg himself
noted that his seminal poem, Howl, was influenced by tenor saxophonist Lester
Young’s “Lester Leaps In.”
The
Beats also saw bebop as a form of protest against white middle-class conformity
in the post-World War II period. Sal
Paradise, a character in On the Road, remarks, “This is the story of America.
Everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to do.” Kerouac and other Beat writers
saw bebop musicians as rebels and “prophets” that represented the best of
American genius and artistic innovation.
**Read the following
excerpts from On the Road and respond to the prompt related to them and the NEA Essay #3**.
“They
danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been
doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me
are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a
commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue
centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!” (p. 5)
“I
was adventuring in the crazy American night.” (p. 100)
“And
as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to
represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to
the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing
something so frantic and rushing–about.” (p. 12)
“Once
there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans;
before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up
their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge,
vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power
and logic and subtlety—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, blowing his taped–up
alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old
swinging Basie and Bennie Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the
rest—Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad
Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie—Charlie Parker in his early days when he
was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than
Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of
jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth
he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and
stretched–out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and
today as he wears his thick–soled shoes so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of
life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy
getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.” (p. 241)
*Jack
Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Group, 2003).
Describe how Kerouac’s perspective on American culture differs from the traditional middle–class culture of the 1950s. See if you can identify characteristics of the prose that are similar to the musical characteristics of bebop.**
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