The Beginning of Bop - Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969),

Jack Kerouac, wrote articles for the American magazine Escapade from  1959 until 1967. Commencing with the essay The Beginning of Bop in the April edition. Kerouac was inspired by and promoted jazz in his writing. He breathed jazz in prose and poetry. Allen Ginsberg called his writing  “spontaneous bop prosody.” The Beats wanted to take the attitudes and lifestyles of jazz greats, like John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Lester Young, and enshrine the ways of these “secret heroes” into a unique style of poetry and prose. This use of music became integral to the Beats, especially in the work of the two most recognized figures within the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. For them jazz became the musical accompaniment to and embodiment of their lifestyle during the late 1940's and early 1950's; it  created a feeling in the Beats of a new reality, one that they strove to recreate in their writings.
Beginning with Kerouac's career-making second novel, On the Road, jazz became a vital element in his fictional milieu but, more important, the essential influence on his writing. Called upon to explain the sources of his dynamic prose style, Kerouac wrote an essay titled "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," which made explicit his links to the jazz musicians he had been exposed to since his arrival in New York. He likened his creative process to "blowing (as per jazz musician) on the subject of image," and equated his use of "the vigorous dash separating rhetorical breathing" to a "jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases." His new mantra: "Tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!—now!—your way is your only way." Kerouac's principles of spontaneous prose and its explicit links to the improvisatory ethos of jazz became the foundation of Beat Generation literary theory.
Both Kerouac and Ginsberg spent time in New York during the post-war 1940's, when the bop revolution was at its peak; to them bop signified a complete departure from the popular, commercialized music of the 1930's. Bop, with its emphasis on extended improvisation that its small-band format allowed, and largely owing to the virtuoso soloists at the time such as Parker and Gillespie, represented individuality, spontaneity, and emotional intensity that was "pure" in a way the commercial music of the 1930's and 1940's was not.
As Ann Charters wrote in Kerouac: A Biography he “identified more with musical geniuses like Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk than he did with any established literary scene . . . Bop was to Kerouac a new art form that had broken through to eloquence. His own method of spontaneous composition was meant to do the same thing with words that he heard bop musicians doing with their instruments. When Miles Davis played, Kerouac heard his trumpet sounding long sentences like Marcel Proust.”
 The Beginning of Bop, is rated by many as very good writing, up with his best. it certainly reveals his astounding knowledge of the musical genre.In his essay Kerouac argues that the irreverence and ironic detachment of these pioneering African American musicians—their recognition of "the goof of life," as he put it—made them "not only misplaced in a white nation but mis-noticed for who they were."
Kerouac also once wrote , "It's not the words that count but the rush of what is said" He wrote with a language that picks at a reader's subconscious and resonates in bursts of images on the imagination. I feel Jazz does this to me too, in these unsettling times the spontaneous voice of Kerouac and the  pulsating rhythms of Jazz both bring much comfort, so here I present to you words that combine both, I hope that you enjoy.

The Beginning of Bop - Jack Kerouac 

     BOP BEGAN WITH JAZZ but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940 Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking down past a men’s clothing store on 42nd street or south main in L.A. when from a loudspeaker they heard a wild and possible mistake in jazz that could have only been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art.Bop.The name derives from an accident, America was named after an Italian explorer not after an Indian king. Lionel Hampton had made a record called "Hey Ba Ba Re Bop" and everybody yelled it and it was when Lionel would jump in the audience and would wail the saxophone with sweat clasp jumping fools in the aisles while the drummer vastly booming and belaboring on the stage as the whole theater rocked. Sung by Helen Humes it was a popular record and sold many copies around 1945 or ‘46. First everyone looked around and then it happened- bop happened. The Bird flew in- minds went in- on the streets thousands of new type hep cats in red shirts and some goatees and strange queer looking cowboys from the west with boots and belts  and the girls began to disappear from the street-you no longer saw as in the 30’s the wrangler walking with his doll in the honkey tonk, now he was alone, rrebop, bop, came into being because the girls were leaving the guys and going off to be middle class models ,Dizzy or Charlie or Thelonious was walking down the street, heard a noise, a sound – half LesterYoung, half raw rainy fog, that has that chest shivering excitement of shack, or track, or empty lot; a sudden vast tiger head on the wood fence rainy no school Saturday morning dump yards – “Hey” and rushed off dancing.

    On the piano that night Thelonious introduced a wooden off key note to everybody’s warm up notes. Minton’s playhouse, evening starts, jam hours later, 10 pm, colored bar and hotel next door. One or two white visitors: some from Columbia, some from Nowhere-some from ships- some from Army Navy Airforce Marines- some from Europe-The  strange note makes the trumpeter of the band
lift an eyebrow. Dizzy is surprised for the first time that day. He puts the trumpet to lips and blows a wet blur-
  “Hee hee hah” laughs Charlie Parker, bending down to slap his ankle. He puts his alto to his mouth and says “Didn’t I tell you?”- with jazz of notes. . .Talking eloquent like great poets of foreign languages singing in foreign countries with lyres by seas and no one understands because the language isn’t alive in the land yet-.Bop is the language from America’s inevitable Africa. Going sounded like gong. Africa is the name of the flew in kick beat off to one side, the sudden squeak uninhibited that screams
muffled at any moment from dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet - do anything you want - drawing the tune  aside along another improvisation. .. . 

. . . . ..bridge with a reach out tear of claws,  why be subtle and false?

The band of 10 pm Minton’s swings into action. Bird Parker who is only 18 years old has a crew cut of Africa looks impossible has perfect eyes and composures of the king when suddenly you stop and look at him in the subway and you can’t believe that bop is here to stay- that it is real. And that negroes in America are just like us. We must look at them understanding the exact racial counterpart of what the man is- andfigure it with histories and lost kings of immemorial tribes and jungle and Fellaheen town and otherwise of the sad mutts sleeping on old porches and big eating bird woods. When just 90 years ago, old roost come running calling “Ma” through the fence, he had just deserted the confederate army and was running home for pone-- and flies on watermelon porches and educated judges in horn rimmed glasses reading the Amsterdam news.

       The  band realized the goof of life that had made them be not only be misplaced in the white nation but misnoticed for what they really were. And the goof they felt stirring and springing in their bellies suddenly Dizzy spats his lips tight drawn together and drives a high screeching fantastic clear note that has everybody in the joint look up - Bird, lips hanging dull to hear is turning slowly in a circle waiting for Dizz to swim through the tune in a tone complicated wave of his own grim like factories and atonal at any minute and the logic of the man, the sock in his belly is sweet
the rock zonga monga bang-In white creamed afternoons of blue, Bird had leaned back dreamily in eternity as Dizzy outlined to him the importance of becoming Mohammedans in order to give a solid basis of race to their ceremony.“Make that rug swing mother. When you say race, bow your head and close your eyes. And give them a religion no Uncle Tom Baptist. Make them wear as of skull caps of respectable minarets in actual New York picking hashi dates from their teeth- Give them new names with zonga sounds- Make it weird-
      Thelonious, he was so weird. He wandered the twilight streets of Harlem in winter with no hat on his hair, sweating, blowing fog- In his head he heard it all ringing. Often he heard whole choruses by Lester.There was a strange English kid hanging around Minton’s who would stumble along the sidewalk hearing Lester in his head too - hours of hundreds of developing choruses in regular beat all day so in the subway none could crash against inalterable choruses and implacable bars- he erected in minds foundation jazz.

     The tune they were playing was All the Things You Are. . .they slowed it down and dragged behind it a half tempo dinosaur proportions- changed the placing of the note in the middle of the harmony to an outer more precarious position where also, its sense of not belonging was enhanced by the general atonality produced with everyone exteriorizing the tunes harmony, the clonk of the millennial piano like anvils in Petrograd.-“Blow” said Dizz and Charlie Parker came in for a solo with a squeaky innocent cry. Monk punched, anguished, nub fingers crawling at the keyboard to tear up foundations and guts of jazz from the big masterbox to make Charlie Parker hear his cry and sigh- ,to jar the orchestra into vibrations- He stared down wild eyed at his keys like a matador at the bull’s head. Groan. Drunken figures shaded in the weaving background, tottering-the boys didn’t care. On cold corners, they stood three backs to one another facing all the winds, bent- lips don’t care - miserable, cold, and broke- waiting like witchdoctors- saying “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”Like twelfth century monks high in winter belfries of the Gothic organ they wild eyed were listening to their own wild sound which was heralding in a new age of music that would eventually require symphonies, schools, centuries of technique, declines and falls of master ripe styles- the Dixieland of Louie Armstrong 16 and new Orleans and the big pop’s forest Jim in the white shirt wailing at a big scarred bass in raunchy nongry New Orleans on South Rampart Street famous for parades and old Perdido Street- horses steaming turds near breweries and saloons,-soon enough it would leap and fill the gay Twenties like champagne in a glass, pop!- And crawl up to the Thirties  with tired Rudy Vallees lamenting with Louie who had laughed in the Twenties Transoceanic Jazz, sick and tired early Ethel Mermans, and old beat bed springs creaking in that stormy weather blues when people would lay in bed all day and moaned and had it good- The world of the United States was tired of being poor and low and gloomy in a line. Swing erupted as the depression began to crack,it was the year marijuana was made illegal, 1937. Young teenagers took to the first restraint, the second, the third, some still wondered in hobo trains (lost boys of the Thirties numbered in the hundreds of thousands, Salvation Armies put up full houses every night and some were ten years old)- teenagers alienated from their parents who had suddenly returned to work and for good to get rid of that damn old mud of the river- and tear the vine off the porch- and paint the porch white- cut the trees down - castrate the hedges- burn the leaves- build a wire fence- get up an antennae-,

listen- the alienated teenager in the 20th century finally ripe, gone wild, modern to be rich
and prosperous, no more just around the corner- became the hep cat, the jitterbug and smoked the new law weed.World War 11 gave everybody two pats of butter in the morning on a service tray, including your sister. Up from tired degrading swing, wondering what had happened between 1937 and 1945 and because the army had worked it, canned it, played it to the boys in north Africa, enraged it in the piccadilly bars and the Andrew Sisters put the corn in the can- swing with its heroes died- and Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk who were hustled through the chow lines-came back remembering old goofs- and tried it again- Zop! Dizzy screamed,Charlie squealed,

Monk crashed, the drummer kicked ,dropped a bomb- the bass question mark plunked- and off they whaled on Salt Peanuts jumping like mad monkeys in the grey new air. “Hey Porkpie, Porkpie, Hey Porkpie!
      "Skidilibree-la-bee you,-oo.-e bop she bam, ske too ria- Parasakiliaoolza - menooorriastibatiolyait-oon ya koo." They came to their own they jumped they had jazz and took it in their hands and saw its histories, vicissitudes, and developments and turned it to their weighty use and heavily carried it clanking like posts across the enormity of a new world philosophy and a new strange and crazy grace came over them , fell from the air free, they saw pity in the old heaven, hell in their hearts,Billy Holiday had rocks in her heart, Lester droopy pork pie had hung his horn and blew bop lazy ideas inside jazz that everybody was dreaming. (Miles Davis leaning against the piano fingering his trumpet with his cigarette hand working making raw iron sound like wood speaking in long sentences like Marcel Proust) -“Hey Jim," and the stud come swinging down the street and says he’s real bent and he is down and he has a twisted face, he works, he wails, he bops, he bangs, this man  who was sent stoned and stabbed is now down, bent and stretched- out-he is home at last, his music is here to stay, his  history has washed over us, his imperialistic kingdoms are coming.

ESCAPADE . APRIL 1959, VOL 111, # 9

As a companion piece here is Kerouac's ' History of Bop'