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Highways 47-50 re-visited in Kerouac's landmark novel and its jazz-rich soundtrack as a BBC centenary special goes back to his routes

‘Jazz Kerouac’, J to Z, BBC Radio 3, July 23rd, 2022 – Kerouac centenary/On the Road special

Jumoké Fashola, London-based singer, broadcaster and journalist, presents ‘Jazz Kerouac’, a 90-minute show commemorating Kerouac’s recent centenary with a musical celebration of his most famous novel. We share a transcript and details of the tracks chosen to illustrate the text…

Hello and welcome. I’m Jumoké Fashola and on the show today we are marking the centenary of jazz poet and ‘King of the Beats’ Jack Kerouac, with a programme full of the music he loved. Where better to start than with a track by the great Dizzy Gillespie, later named in his honour, recorded live at Monroe’s in New York City. This is ‘Kerouac’…

Recording: Dizzy Gillespie Quintet – ‘Kerouac’

A dedication to the writer and Beat pioneer who would have been 100 on 12th March. His influence cannot be underestimated, not only for his poetry but also for the way he captured the spirit of jazz. Celebrations to mark his centenary have taken place throughout the year, especially in his home town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and we wanted to do our bit here on J to Z.

Now, jazz and poetry have been a particular passion of mine since I was a teenager so I am delighted to be presenting this afternoon’s show. Dreams do indeed come true…

Jack Kerouac adored jazz and tried to reflect the rhythms and the spontaneity and the freedom of the music in his work. At the start of his poetry collection Mexico City Blues, he writes: ‘I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.’

His landmark novel On the Road is full of references to records and musicians he loved along with vivid descriptions of gigs and jam sessions. So, over the next 90 minutes, we will be taking an audio road trip of our own, recreating the sound world of the novel and playing some of the records that Kerouac dug, along with excerpts from his poetry and a few of his own collaborations with jazz musicians.

So, allow me to set the scene: the year is 1947 and, in Kerouac’s words, ‘bop was going like mad all over America’. This is the first record he mentions in On the Road by a musician he adored above all others – Charlie Parker’s ‘Ornithology’…

Recording: Charlie Parker – ‘Ornithology’

Recording: Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen – ‘Charlie Parker’

Jack Kerouac performing his tribute to Charlie Parker with pianist and talk show host Steve Allen from the album Poetry for the Beat Generation. And before that we heard Bird himself with ‘Ornithology’.

Kerouac’s novel On the Road follows the adventures of his alter ego Sal Paradise as he races back-and-forth across America in the company of his friends, particularly the hard-drinking, joyriding Dean Moriarty, a free spirit and fellow jazz obsessive.

Early in the novel, Sal hitchhikes West from New York to meet Dean and Carlo Marx, also known as Allen Ginsberg. He winds up in LA and is swept away by the energy of the city, likening it to a favourite Lionel Hampton record: ‘The wild humming night of Central Avenue. The night of Hamp’s “Central Avenue Breakdown” howled and boomed along outside. They were singing in the halls, singing from their windows, just hell and be damned and look out.’

Recording: Lionel Hampton – ‘Central Avenue Breakdown’

Wild stuff indeed! Hamp gets another mention in Kerouac’s later poem ‘Fantasy: The Early History of Bop’, alongside several other bebop innovators who Kerouac hailed as geniuses at the time when their artistry was still being overlooked and derided by many. Here’s what he had to say…

Recording: Jack Kerouac – ‘Fantasy: The Early History of Bop’

Recording: Helen Humes – ‘Be Baba Leba’

‘Be Baba Leba’ written and sung by Helen Humes, a tune that was later recorded by Lionel Hampton as ‘Hey Baba Rebop’.

Now, along with LA, Kerouac’s narrator Sal makes a couple of trips to San Francisco over the course of the book. ‘Everybody in Frisco blew,’ he writes. ‘It was the end of the continent. They didn’t give a damn.’

Some of the. most memorable scenes in On the Road take place at clubs and late-night jam sessions packed with fellow Beats as Kerouac describes…

Recording: Jack Kerouac – ‘San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation)’

So, one night, Sal and Dean go to see Slim Gaillard, a charismatic multi-instrumentalist and singer with a fondness for nonsense words, who has the crowd in the palm of his hands. ‘Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes,’ Kerouac writes, ‘and suddenly the big, burly bass player wakes up from a reverie and realises Slim is playing “C Jam Blues” and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big, booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking.’ Well, here’s what it might have sounded like: Slim Gaillard recorded live in Los Angeles in 1945…

Recording: Slim Gaillard – ‘Opera in Vout (Groove Juice Symphony)’

Can you imagine being in that crowd? Talk about having the audience in the palm of your hand! that was ‘Groove Juice Symphony’ by Slim Gaillard, featuring a burst of ‘C Jam Blues’.

Now, back in New York City, Kerouac’s protagonists Sal and Dean go to Birdland to watch the British pianist George Shearing. ‘His chords rolled out the piano in great rich showers,’ Kerouac writes. ‘Dean was sweating, the sweat poured down his collar. “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes, yes, yes…”’

Recording: George Shearing – ‘September in the Rain’

Recording: Willie Jackson – ‘Gator Tail, Part Two’

Now, you can see why that got Jack Kerouac’s pulse racing! ‘Gator Tail’ by Willie Jackson. Kerouac wrote in his journal, ‘I don’t care what anyone says but I am pulled out of my shoes by wild stuff like that. Pure whiskey!’ And before that we heard George Shearing, ‘September in the Rain’ recorded at Claremont College in California in 1957.

Well, I think it’s time for a breather. Billie Holliday was another musician Kerouac adored. ‘My mind was filled with that great song “Lover Man”,’ he writes, in a particularly tender passage of On the Road. “It’s not the words so much as the great harmonic tune and the way Billie sings it like a woman stroking her man’s hair in soft lamplight.’

Recording; Billie Holiday – ‘Lover Man’

Recording: Jack Kerouac – ‘And Zop!’

Recording: Dizzy Gillespie – ‘Salt Peanuts’

Recording: Jack Kerouac – ‘Fantasy: The Early History of Bop’

Recording: Miles Davis – ‘Yesterdays’

Ooh, Miles Davis making iron sound like wood on ‘Yesterdays’. And before that we had some of the Dizzy Gillespie classic ‘Salt Peanuts’ as mentioned in Kerouac’s ‘History of Bop’. He also references one of the great tenor players of the day, Lester Young, affectionately known as ‘Pork Pie Hat’.

Kerouac was crazy for a sax solo. In fact, if there’s one record that sums up the headlong rush of On the Road and the reckless energy of the Beats, it’s an epic tenor battle that gets a couple of mentions in the novel.

‘Dean stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called “The Hunt”, with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume.’

Now, the full track is over 18-minutes long but I wanted to play a bit for you, so we will pick it up mid-way as Dexter and Wardell start to spar…

Recording: Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray – ‘The Hunt’

What an epic battle! No wonder Kerouac was inspired. That was ‘The Hunt’ with the duelling saxophones of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray.

In he final part of On the Road, Sal and Dean cross the border into Mexico and end up in a brothel blasting mambo records by a bandleader called Perez Prado – ‘More Mambo Jumbo’, ‘Chattanooga de Mambo’, ‘Mambo Numero Ocho’. ‘All these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like the sound you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the second coming.’

Recording: Perez Prado – ‘Mambo Numero Ocho’

If that doesn’t get you dancing, I don’t know what will! That was Perez Prado with ‘Mambo Numero Ocho’

Kerouac wrote On the Road in a rush of inspiration, putting his jazz-inspired spontaneous prose style to the test, typing flat out for three weeks on a continuous roll of paper, 120 feet long. The book came out in 1957. In the words of Bob Dylan, ‘It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.’

Shortly after its publication, Kerouac went to see Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane’s historic residency at the Five Spot Café in New York, which he wrote ‘is darkly lit, has weird waiters, good music always, sometimes John “Trane’ Coltrane showers his rough notes from his tenor horn all over the place.’ Luckily for us, that residency was recorded, so here they are with ‘Epistrophy’…

Recording: Thelonious Monk Quartet and John Coltrane – ‘Epistrophy’

The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane with ‘Epistrophy’ recorded live at the Five Spot in New York in 1958.

Now, that same year, Kerouac recorded a collection of poems with two more of the great saxophonists of the day, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

Recording: Jack Kerouac – ‘Book of Blues’

From the album Blues and Haikus, that was an excerpt of poems from the unpublished Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac, featuring Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

Kerouac was a familiar face at New York jazz joints including Monroe’s and reportedly spent so much time at Minton’s Playhouse they asked his wife Edie to open an account. He was certainly known to some of the musicians. Now, rumour has it that Lester Young gave him his first joint.

Decades later, the singer Mark Murphy, one of my all-time favourite vocalists, recorded two albums dedicated to him – Bop for Kerouac and Kerouac: Then and Now – but not everyone was a fan. The great Louis Armstrong, a bebop sceptic, also had a dig at the Beats in a recording from 1959.

Recording: Louis Armstrong – ‘The Beat Generation’

Well, Louis Armstrong not pulling any punches about the so-called Beat Generation.

Now. jazz and spoken word have often gone hand-in-hand. There’s a rich history that continues to this day, so I want to play you something from one of my favourite contemporary jazz poets who I think Kerouac would have adored: the award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist and musician Anthony Joseph. A professor of creative literature, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums and his live performances are always enthralling.

His 2021 album, The Rich are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives, is full of protest songs but it is also highly personal, exploring his own struggles and the tribulations of poets who came before him. From it, this is ‘Swing Praxis’…

Recording: Anthony Joseph – ‘Swing Praxis’

With Shabaka Hutchings on tenor, utterly stirring stuff from the incredible Anthony Joseph: that was ‘Swing Praxis’ from the album The Rich are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives.

Thank you for listening to this week’s J to Z. I hope you dug our Kerouac special. You can find full details of all the music and artists.featured in today’s programme on the Radio 3 website and, if there is anything you missed, you can listen again by BBC Sounds.

For now, I will let Jack Kerouac and pianist Steve Allen have the final word. Let’s call it one more for the road…

Recording: Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen – Readings from On the Road and Visions of Cody, 1959

‘Jazz Kerouac’, J to Z, Kerouac centenary special was presented by Jumoké Fashola, producer Thomas Rees, a Somethin’ Else production for BBC Radio 3

Note: To listen to this show in full at BBC Sounds visit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019bym