Stanley Crouch Parker biography reviewed

[ArtSalt]

I don't see at such, perhaps because I love chinese food so much.

Kerouac wrote some terrible stuff at times, particularly his poetry and not to mention his often mistake of confusing jazz musicians instruments and also time periods. He certainly wouldn't have shot himself over that paragraph and he wouldn't have seen the alleged bathos in it, not from his catholic-zen-bebop-spontaneous-prosody perspective. He would get it!

[Larry Kart]

My take on Kerouac and jazz, from my book (BTW, counter to what I say below at one point, I now like a good deal of his poetry). In any case, the "square" clunkiness of Crouch's prose in the Chinese food riff is IMO far removed from both Kerouac's virtues and his flaws:

JAZZ AND JACK KEROUAC

[1983]

What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight.

A good place to begin is at a level that might not seem very important at first--the quasi-journalistic, jazz-tinged vignettes that Kerouac sometimes used as scenic backdrops. Here, in The Subterraneans, is Roger Beloit (a character based on tenor saxophonist Allen Eager) “... listening [on the radio] to Stan Kenton talk about the music of tomorrow and we hear a new young tenor man come on, Ricci Comucca, Roger Beloit says, moving back thin expressive purple lips, ‘This is the music of tomorrow?’”

The actual name of the musician involved is Richie Kamuca, not Ricci Comucca, but leave that be. What matters is the way Kerouac has captured a small yet essential twitch of the jazz sensibility. Beloit-Eager, “that great poet I’d revered in my youth,” as Leo Percepied says to us and to himself a few pages later on, was a first-generation white disciple of Lester Young and, of all those players, the one best able to modify Young’s style to fit the more rhythmically and harmonically angular world of bebop; while Kamuca, coming along a half-generation or so behind Eager, was also inspired by Lester Young (and perhaps by Eager as well). Eager was at his peak in the mid- to late 1940s, but “now it is no longer 1948 but 1953 with cool generations and I [i.e., Percepied-Kerouac] five years older.” So the joke, if that’s the way to put it, is that Beloit-Eager’s “This is the music of tomorrow?” remark is steeped in mordant irony, as though he were saying, though he’s too “hip” to be this explicit, ‘Hey, I was ahead of this guy five years ago.”

Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fictional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time.

In Kerouac’s fiction there are a number of other moments like the Beloit-Eager passage--brief, seemingly casual glimpses that take the reader and the narrator into the heart of what Kerouac chose to call, at various times, “Jazz America” (On the Road) or the “Jazz Century” (Book of Dreams). But these glimpses are only glimpses. The narrator happens to be there, and what he sees or overhears doesn’t bring him into direct contact with what he has perceived.

A good example, no less shrewd than the Beloit-Eager vignette, is the narrator’s reminiscence, in Desolation Angels, of Stan Getz sitting in a toilet stall in Birdland, “blowing his horn quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything--(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said),” Marsh being Tristano’s tenor saxophonist of the time. Again, this has meaning within Kerouac’s self-referential fictional world; it’s a thought that ought to occur to Jack Duluoz at the time. But “Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh!” is also, one suspects, exactly what Getz was saying to himself as he sat there in that actual toilet stall.

It would be nice to linger over these precise, attractive insights, but now it’s time to look at the painful stuff, the yearning Kerouac’s heroes have to be part of something they can’t really belong to. At times there is (at least one hopes there is) a deliberate edge of farce to the program, for how can one do anything but gag at stuff like “I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero!” (Visions of Cody), “good oldfashioned jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls” (Visions of Cody), and “wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (On the Road). As Jack Duluoz says in Visions of Cody, referring, perhaps, to Sherwood Anderson’s novel: “Dark laughter has come again!”

Of course this is fiction, and it’s fair, especially in the “true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” case, to put some distance between Kerouac and his narrator, who at that point in On the Road ought to be half a fool. But common sense finally says that this not only fiction but is also, more often than not, exactly what it seems to be--a moonstruck desire to turn jazz into some imaginary black earth-mother and, in the process, shed all sorts of inhibitions, just like those “unashamed…good oldfashioned jitterbugs.” And Kerouac pushes it even further at times. “You and I,” writes Jack Duluoz to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, “could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians”--a vision that again raises the question of how much distance there is between the narrator and his words, for if “You and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians” is to be taken at anything close to face value (and I can see little reason not to take it that way), it is the self-delusion of a naïve tourist. Jazz has, and always will have, its romantic component, but surely this is a music of overriding emotional realism. So if anyone thinks that there is some intrinsic bond between the music of Charlie Parker or Lester Young and a “weekend climaxed by bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano...and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group…(this from Visions of Cody)--well, James Dean played the bongos, too.

But what of the “jazz” texture of Kerouac’s prose and verse, for which some grandiose claims have been made (Kerouac himself saying of Mexico City Blues: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday”)? The “spontaneous prose” business isn’t worth bothering about in any literal sense, because the “no pause to think of proper word”... “if possible write ‘without consciousness” aspects of the program apparently were not adhered to very often. How “the object is set before the mind” is the point; and in any case it’s the results that matter--that is, do the words, labored over or not, manage to capture the feel of spontaneity?

To a remarkable degree they do, less so in the raggle-taggle verse (the Book of Dreams being much superior to the otherwise comparable Mexico City Blues) than in the best of the prose, where Kerouac does at least two things: he captures the sound of all kinds of jazz-related talk, from the hip, ingrown-toenail language of his Subterraneans to Cody Pomeroy’s manic, carnival-barker monologues. And having a wonderful ear for the speech of others, Kerouac also could hear himself, which is where his wish “to be considered a jazz poet” really rests.

What kind of a jazz poet? That brings us back to Roger Beloit-Allen Eager and the other Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonists Kerouac seemed most fond of, the late Brew Moore (or, as Kerouac always spelled the name, “Brue” Moore). Moore figures most prominently in Chapter 97 of Desolation Angels, which has its moments of fan-like, romantic presumption (“Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time--besides he wants to play a new tune--I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he’s right”). But this dream of participating in the magical “IT” of jazz, “the big moment of rapport all around” (words given to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody) seems small alongside Kerouac’s ability to sustain the rhythm of a paragraph or a chapter on a series of long, swinging, almost literal breaths. Here Kerouac achieved his dream of a prose that shadows the chorus structure of an improvising jazz soloist. And it is the sound of men like Moore and Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture.

“I wish Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct,” Kerouac writes in Book of Dreams, “but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of quietness.” Listening to Eager or Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation--as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy “Ah, me,” which would border on passivity if it weren’t for the need to move on, to keep the line going.

Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman’s long line and Thomas Wolfe’s garrulous flow. And I wouldn’t insist that Kerouac’s prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn’t the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching--his “holy flowers floating…in the dawn of Jazz America” and “great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns” stuff--Kerouac’s desire to be part of “the jazz century” led to a prose that was, at its best, jazz-like from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground (as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen (as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac’s vision.

“These are men!” wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore--and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter--a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story, too.

[AllenLowe]

I've given up on the Crouch/Bird thing; if anybody wants my copy, will sell for $10 plus shipping USA. Once I stopped reading it I couldn't start again.

[Leeway]

The library finally got a copy, and I picked it up last week. Only a couple of chapters in. Some things that stand out: sourcing is often vague or non-existent. Where the sourcing is indicated, it might or might not be reliable. For example, people on the fringe of Parker's life, recalling incidents 30 or 40 years earlier, often single-sourced. There is some value to oral history, but there is also a lot of error in such accounts. Another facet I'm not keen on is Crouch tries to give you the inner thoughts and reactions of Parker and others. This is an old technique, often used in histories and biographies for juveniles. It is a fictionalization of events passed off as history/biography. In a sense, this is a very unsophisticated book. Crouch's talent lies more in vivid analogies and working up a scene in a dramatic fashion. Like I said, I'm not too far along, so some of these perceptions might change.

[flat5]

My copy is epub. I'm hoping to read some good stories. Maybe learn something and laugh.

[sgcim]

Another Kerouac 'naming' from The Subterraneans was the character Harold Sands, who represented the novelist William Gaddis, who hung in The Village with Kerouac in the 50s, and who had just had the manuscript of "The Recognitions" accepted by a publisher.

You can still hear the influence of Kerouac's take on jazz in the lyrics of Donald Fagen, a big Beat fanatic.

[Quasimado]

But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager ...

Concerning Allen, where do you get this from, Larry? I'm talking late 40's early 50's. Maybe your musical ears hear subtleties mine don't ... but are you sure Lester's "gray boys" reference didn't influence your thesis? Perhaps initially you meant to write "gray boyish" - then it's easy to see where you are coming from...

Q

[AllenLowe]

boyish works partially because Eager was played out by about 1954. Listen to him on the George Handy session with Schildkraut (can't thing of the album name); he sounds tired and indifferent. When I met him he was the same, though also vain and nasty.

[Quasimado]

Allen - The album title is "Handyland USA", and his playing is not too bad - basically one chorus per tune - everybody is a little tired, including Davey (the recording session finished at 6:30 a.m.).

Then again he plays well on the Gerry Mulligan Songbook, both on tenor and a very dark toned alto (probably the highlight of the disc) - and that was 1957!

Anyway it wasn't age I was referring to - he did some his greatest playing with Fats in the late 40's, and qualitively, that was hardly "boyish" ...

Q

[Larry Kart]

But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager ...

Concerning Allen, where do you get this from, Larry? I'm talking late 40's early 50's. Maybe your musical ears hear subtleties mine don't ... but are you sure Lester's "gray boys" reference didn't influence your thesis? Perhaps initially you meant to write "gray boyish" - then it's easy to see where you are coming from...

Q

At this distance in time (31 years) from when I wrote that piece, I'm not entirely sure why, aside from the presence of that W.C.W. Williams poem, I used the term "boyish" for Eager, Brew Moore, Beiderbecke and Teschemacher, although of course all four of them were "grey boys." The phrase that I used in explanation/apposition to "boyish" was "a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside," the implication being that those terms/feelings would not have been true (or true in the same ways) of the other figures mentioned: Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Thelonious Monk. Moore and Eager, by contrast to those figures, and for all their artistry and individuality, were at heart (i.e. in their own hearts, in particular) disciples of Lester Young. In fact, Moore is famous for saying something like "If you don't play like Pres, you're wrong." As for Eager, his boyishness also took the form of behaving in what could be called an overtly boyish manner socially, as in playing at life -- e.g. hanging out as a hanger on with the foreign jet set, driving race cars, messing around with LSD with Timothy Leary, etc. (Eager said that he was the one who told Leary to stop experimenting carefully with the stuff like a damn scientist and instead just take whopping amounts of it, get stoned, and then see how you feel). As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

[Big Beat Steve]

As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?)

[AllenLowe]

Quasi - I actually think Schildkraut sounds great on Handyland (it was Case Ace from that, that Mingus thought was Bird in that famous blindfold test); but Eager? Demoralized, to my ears.

[Larry Kart]

As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?)

Bix, somewhere between perhaps and probably; Tesch IIRC was living in a fairly hell-for-leather, both-ends-of-the-candle manner, though he wasn't driving that car, Jimmy McPartland was. OTOH, as I said, "to get way too romantic no doubt."

[paul secor]

As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?)

Bix, somewhere between perhaps and probably; Tesch IIRC was living in a fairly hell-for-leather, both-ends-of-the-candle manner, though he wasn't driving that car, Jimmy McPartland was. OTOH, as I said, "to get way too romantic no doubt."

Wasn't it Wild BIll Davidson who was driving the car?

[Larry Kart]

Quasi - I actually think Schildkraut sounds great on Handyland (it was Case Ace from that, that Mingus thought was Bird in that famous blindfold test); but Eager? Demoralized, to my ears.

I agree about both Schildkraut and Eager on "Handyland," though Eager has some moments there. Lord, when I heard him at the Jazz Showcase in '80s with Al Cohn, he could barely play at all. Al not only seemed disgusted by this but also responded with some of the most fiercely intense playing I'd ever heard from him, as though he were trying to punish Allen, shake him by the neck like a misbehaving puppy. I mentioned this to someone a short while later -- I think it was Ira Gitler, who would have been in a position to know -- and he said that Allen had been a very arrogant S.O.B. on the scene circa 1947, especially toward up-and-coming players like Cohn, and that Al had never forgotten that.

As for Bix and Tesch, their music, while not callow in quality (certainly not Bix's), not only sounds youthful to me (in ways that the music of the comparably young Armstrong. for all its immense vigor, does not) but also seems to express and reflect upon that youthfulness. In fact, to get way too romantic no doubt, their music seems at times to express (in Bix's melancholic beauty, Tesch's hurtling inventiveness) the fact that they literally would not live long enough to grow up.

You mean they knew or sensed they wouldn't? (Liittle surprise in the case of Bix, but Tesch? Wasn't his death accidental?)

Bix, somewhere between perhaps and probably; Tesch IIRC was living in a fairly hell-for-leather, both-ends-of-the-candle manner, though he wasn't driving that car, Jimmy McPartland was. OTOH, as I said, "to get way too romantic no doubt."

Wasn't it Wild BIll Davidson who was driving the car?

Oops -- you're right.

[AllenLowe]

I saw Eager about the same time, at Newport/NYC, same basic show; he was awful. We met briefly and he was nasty. Big disappointment on both fronts.

[Quasimado]

Whatever Larry... I enjoyed what you originally wrote as a piece of subjective writing ... asking if it was all true was perhaps a little unfair. It's a hard life for a writer/ critic.

Q

[ArtSalt]

My take on Kerouac and jazz, from my book (BTW, counter to what I say below at one point, I now like a good deal of his poetry). In any case, the "square" clunkiness of Crouch's prose in the Chinese food riff is IMO far removed from both Kerouac's virtues and his flaws:

JAZZ AND JACK KEROUAC

[1983]

What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight.

A good place to begin is at a level that might not seem very important at first--the quasi-journalistic, jazz-tinged vignettes that Kerouac sometimes used as scenic backdrops. Here, in The Subterraneans, is Roger Beloit (a character based on tenor saxophonist Allen Eager) “... listening [on the radio] to Stan Kenton talk about the music of tomorrow and we hear a new young tenor man come on, Ricci Comucca, Roger Beloit says, moving back thin expressive purple lips, ‘This is the music of tomorrow?’”

The actual name of the musician involved is Richie Kamuca, not Ricci Comucca, but leave that be. What matters is the way Kerouac has captured a small yet essential twitch of the jazz sensibility. Beloit-Eager, “that great poet I’d revered in my youth,” as Leo Percepied says to us and to himself a few pages later on, was a first-generation white disciple of Lester Young and, of all those players, the one best able to modify Young’s style to fit the more rhythmically and harmonically angular world of bebop; while Kamuca, coming along a half-generation or so behind Eager, was also inspired by Lester Young (and perhaps by Eager as well). Eager was at his peak in the mid- to late 1940s, but “now it is no longer 1948 but 1953 with cool generations and I [i.e., Percepied-Kerouac] five years older.” So the joke, if that’s the way to put it, is that Beloit-Eager’s “This is the music of tomorrow?” remark is steeped in mordant irony, as though he were saying, though he’s too “hip” to be this explicit, ‘Hey, I was ahead of this guy five years ago.”

Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fictional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time.

In Kerouac’s fiction there are a number of other moments like the Beloit-Eager passage--brief, seemingly casual glimpses that take the reader and the narrator into the heart of what Kerouac chose to call, at various times, “Jazz America” (On the Road) or the “Jazz Century” (Book of Dreams). But these glimpses are only glimpses. The narrator happens to be there, and what he sees or overhears doesn’t bring him into direct contact with what he has perceived.

A good example, no less shrewd than the Beloit-Eager vignette, is the narrator’s reminiscence, in Desolation Angels, of Stan Getz sitting in a toilet stall in Birdland, “blowing his horn quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything--(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said),” Marsh being Tristano’s tenor saxophonist of the time. Again, this has meaning within Kerouac’s self-referential fictional world; it’s a thought that ought to occur to Jack Duluoz at the time. But “Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh!” is also, one suspects, exactly what Getz was saying to himself as he sat there in that actual toilet stall.

It would be nice to linger over these precise, attractive insights, but now it’s time to look at the painful stuff, the yearning Kerouac’s heroes have to be part of something they can’t really belong to. At times there is (at least one hopes there is) a deliberate edge of farce to the program, for how can one do anything but gag at stuff like “I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero!” (Visions of Cody), “good oldfashioned jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls” (Visions of Cody), and “wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (On the Road). As Jack Duluoz says in Visions of Cody, referring, perhaps, to Sherwood Anderson’s novel: “Dark laughter has come again!”

Of course this is fiction, and it’s fair, especially in the “true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” case, to put some distance between Kerouac and his narrator, who at that point in On the Road ought to be half a fool. But common sense finally says that this not only fiction but is also, more often than not, exactly what it seems to be--a moonstruck desire to turn jazz into some imaginary black earth-mother and, in the process, shed all sorts of inhibitions, just like those “unashamed…good oldfashioned jitterbugs.” And Kerouac pushes it even further at times. “You and I,” writes Jack Duluoz to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, “could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians”--a vision that again raises the question of how much distance there is between the narrator and his words, for if “You and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians” is to be taken at anything close to face value (and I can see little reason not to take it that way), it is the self-delusion of a naïve tourist. Jazz has, and always will have, its romantic component, but surely this is a music of overriding emotional realism. So if anyone thinks that there is some intrinsic bond between the music of Charlie Parker or Lester Young and a “weekend climaxed by bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano...and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group…(this from Visions of Cody)--well, James Dean played the bongos, too.

But what of the “jazz” texture of Kerouac’s prose and verse, for which some grandiose claims have been made (Kerouac himself saying of Mexico City Blues: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday”)? The “spontaneous prose” business isn’t worth bothering about in any literal sense, because the “no pause to think of proper word”... “if possible write ‘without consciousness” aspects of the program apparently were not adhered to very often. How “the object is set before the mind” is the point; and in any case it’s the results that matter--that is, do the words, labored over or not, manage to capture the feel of spontaneity?

To a remarkable degree they do, less so in the raggle-taggle verse (the Book of Dreams being much superior to the otherwise comparable Mexico City Blues) than in the best of the prose, where Kerouac does at least two things: he captures the sound of all kinds of jazz-related talk, from the hip, ingrown-toenail language of his Subterraneans to Cody Pomeroy’s manic, carnival-barker monologues. And having a wonderful ear for the speech of others, Kerouac also could hear himself, which is where his wish “to be considered a jazz poet” really rests.

What kind of a jazz poet? That brings us back to Roger Beloit-Allen Eager and the other Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonists Kerouac seemed most fond of, the late Brew Moore (or, as Kerouac always spelled the name, “Brue” Moore). Moore figures most prominently in Chapter 97 of Desolation Angels, which has its moments of fan-like, romantic presumption (“Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time--besides he wants to play a new tune--I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he’s right”). But this dream of participating in the magical “IT” of jazz, “the big moment of rapport all around” (words given to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody) seems small alongside Kerouac’s ability to sustain the rhythm of a paragraph or a chapter on a series of long, swinging, almost literal breaths. Here Kerouac achieved his dream of a prose that shadows the chorus structure of an improvising jazz soloist. And it is the sound of men like Moore and Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture.

“I wish Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct,” Kerouac writes in Book of Dreams, “but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of quietness.” Listening to Eager or Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation--as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy “Ah, me,” which would border on passivity if it weren’t for the need to move on, to keep the line going.

Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman’s long line and Thomas Wolfe’s garrulous flow. And I wouldn’t insist that Kerouac’s prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn’t the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching--his “holy flowers floating…in the dawn of Jazz America” and “great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns” stuff--Kerouac’s desire to be part of “the jazz century” led to a prose that was, at its best, jazz-like from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground (as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen (as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac’s vision.

“These are men!” wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore--and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter--a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story, too.

Very Interesting, but I challenge The Dulouz Legend as fiction, it is autobiographical, the interior world of Kerouac; bebop prosody, Old Grandad laced with benzedrine.

[Larry Kart]

Very Interesting, but I challenge The Dulouz Legend as fiction, it is autobiographical, the interior world of Kerouac; bebop prosody, Old Grandad laced with benzedrine.

Did I mention The Dulouz Legend? In any case, it's commonly regarded as semi-autobiographical.

[AllenLowe]

actually, it's The Legend of Duluoz; I believe; the Columbia years; one of my favorites.

Also - I thought Wild Bill Davison was driving the car when Teschemacher got killed -

Edited March 5, 2014 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

Also - I thought Wild Bill Davison was driving the car when Teschemacher got killed -

We established that; I goofed.

[Chuck Nessa]

Wild Bill was really defensive about that. I think the event dogged him to the grave.

[JSngry]

I have this book in my bathroom, always gonna be the next one I start reading, but I keep putting other stuff on top it that looks more interesting. Who knows if they actually iare if/when I ever go ahead and start reading it, maybe it will be one of those oh shit i should have started reading this long ago, not just right now dammit. And maybe it won't be. We'll see, maybe, and if.

[ArtSalt]

Very Interesting, but I challenge The Dulouz Legend as fiction, it is autobiographical, the interior world of Kerouac; bebop prosody, Old Grandad laced with benzedrine.

Did I mention The Dulouz Legend? In any case, it's commonly regarded as semi-autobiographical.

No, it was me who mentioned it, but I think this is important as Kerouac himself perceived his works as all comprising one mythic autobiography. Jazz is of course essential throughout, but as the quintessential beat-jazz-poet, even though he was the grandaddy of them all, I am always left with the thought of what could have been if Kerouac had stayed sober. I think Kerouac tells us more about the literature of alcoholism, repressed sexuality and a chronic and sad (rapid) descent from genius to mediocrity than it does about jazz poetics.

I have mixed feelings about Kerouac's poetry and some of the extra tracks on the Rhino box-set of his poetry, reveal his goofy drunkeness in full flow, sad and pitiful.

Thanks to AllenLowe for the correction in spelling.....

[Larry Kart]

Very Interesting, but I challenge The Dulouz Legend as fiction, it is autobiographical, the interior world of Kerouac; bebop prosody, Old Grandad laced with benzedrine.

Did I mention The Dulouz Legend? In any case, it's commonly regarded as semi-autobiographical.

No, it was me who mentioned it, but I think this is important as Kerouac himself perceived his works as all comprising one mythic autobiography. Jazz is of course essential throughout, but as the quintessential beat-jazz-poet, even though he was the grandaddy of them all, I am always left with the thought of what could have been if Kerouac had stayed sober. I think Kerouac tells us more about the literature of alcoholism, repressed sexuality and a chronic and sad (rapid) descent from genius to mediocrity than it does about jazz poetics.

I have mixed feelings about Kerouac's poetry and some of the extra tracks on the Rhino box-set of his poetry, reveal his goofy drunkeness in full flow, sad and pitiful.

Thanks to AllenLowe for the correction in spelling.....

Emphasis on the "mythic." Don't think you can take any Kerouac text as being that much closer to the autobiographical truth than any other. Can't imagine what a Kerouac who stayed sober might have been like or even that that would have been possible. Of all the people who need to be taken all of a piece, he would seem to be it.