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Kerouac and Jazz
The literary world was forever changed when Jack Kerouac’s debut novel, On the Road,
was published in 1947. Kerouac became one of the most influential writers of the 1940s and 50s.
He and his group of friends, who called themselves the Beat Generation, wrote unconventional,
raw, subjective, in-the-moment prose and poetry that included scenes of sex, drugs, and, most
importantly, jazz. Though many of the scenes in Beat novels concentrate on sex and drug intake,
their prose and worldview were most influenced by the passionate solos, the spontaneity, and the
unconventional configurations of jazz – which resulted in the creation of unique and beautiful
music and prose, such as Kerouac’s novel, On the Road.
Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922 in Lowell,
Massachusetts. His mother and father were French-Canadian immigrants with blue-collar jobs:
his father was a printer and his mother a factory worker. They lived in a working-class
neighborhood and were never considered rich people, but the Kerouacs got by. However, when
Jack was nine years old, his older brother, Gerard, died from rheumatic fever; Gerard’s death
changed the family forever. Kerouac never got over his brother’s death, and his father fell into a
frenzy of alcoholism that Kerouac soon inherited. But life had to go on. Kerouac got a football
scholarship to Columbia University in New York. The family moved with their son to New York
where Kerouac intended to study business; however, things did not go as planned. Though at the
university on a football scholarship, Kerouac did not get along with the football coach and was
never allowed to play. Naturally, this upset Kerouac (who did not seem to be getting along with
the college scene anyway) and he dropped out of school. Then Kerouac tried his bit in the army,
but that failed as well. Although his parents were disappointed and he felt lost, this was the time
of his life that he started to write professionally (“Jack Kerouac”).
As a child, Kerouac had always enjoyed creating and telling stories – a passion that
eventually led him to meet the friends that he would call the Beats (“Jack Kerouac”). As an adult
with free time on his hands, Kerouac decided to pursue his old childhood dream of writing. He
used “his newly freed time to read voraciously, write continuously, and intensify his experiences
in the city” (Swartz 15). As he roamed the New York streets, Kerouac became a regular at
certain spots and bars. It is at these spots and bars that Kerouac met Neal Cassady, Allen
Ginsberg, and William Burroughs – the original group of Beats.
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Cassady, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were also all writers. They were a small group of
experimental and intellectual poets that encouraged “soul sharing” – a free-flow of personal
emotions and ideas expressed honestly. They did not believe in conventions, nor did they trust
establishments: these friends were the drug-using, poetry-loving, outcast-youths of American
society. Though they were viewed by society as “washouts and misfits,” Kerouac and his friends
were more “self-conscious dropouts who have decided to create themselves in their own terms,
hearkening back to a more individualistic and personal America, far from the faceless present”
(Braudy 110).
Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and Burroughs did not always refer to themselves as the
Beats. It was not until Kerouac had an interview with a magazine after On the Road was
published, that the term “Beat” was dropped by Kerouac and picked up by the media. The Beat
Generation, according to Kerouac, is the subterranean culture of beaten, beatific, and beat artists.
They are the beaten, “broken…down, pushed to the margins of existence by a cruel and hostile
world” Americans (Whaley 11). They are the blessedly beatific, down with the “free flowing”
beats of jazz (Whaley 11). To Kerouac, they are the angels and bodhisattvas of the tired and
worn-out masses who challenge the world that defies them to create something divine and hip.
They were much like the jazz musicians who were “challenging the musical, linguistic, and
institutional structures that produced and defined the music and its makers” (Whaley 2). This
was the Beat Generation.
The Beats were a product of the 50s – an era in which “conformity was seen as a civil
good” (Wilson 302). It was the post-bellum years, and many people felt disillusioned and jaded
in the aftermaths of war. Many Americans turned to a consumer lifestyle, while others wanted to
take a step away from the old ways. Either way, people felt disconnected and alienated from
society. Kerouac and his friends were part of the rebellious youth who wanted to depart from
past conventions and rules. They wanted something real and concrete to hold on to: they wanted
to “discover and portray varieties of human nature beyond those that could be encompassed by
bourgeois comforts of definitions of society” (Braudy 111). This ideal mirrored that of jazz
music, and the 50s was a bopping time for jazz music: it was the era of Miles Davis, Duke
Ellington, and Charlie “Bird” Parker.
A flurry of fast, high-pitched notes fly through the air only to be followed by smooth and
sensual ones that slowly glide and dance around the room. The sound is seductive; the moment
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intense. It is unpredictable and raw: it is jazz. Born in America, jazz is the music of AfricanAmericans and Anglo-Americans, not of Africans and Europeans. It is the unconventional,
daring, melodic music of America. Created from the comingling and blending of different
musical genres and styles, jazz is a unique art form that cannot be defined so easily. In fact,
many people claim that jazz is indefinable – as Louis Armstrong once said, “If you gotta ask,
you’ll never know.” But it can be agreed that jazz is soulful. It is about virtuosic solos, anticonventions, and in-the-moment expression. Musicians play on the spot and rely on emotion
over intellectual or musical confines: “[t]he experience supersedes craft” (Whaley 34). That is
why, as Kerouac and his fellow Beats roamed New York, it was the jazz joints that attracted
them. The Beats wanted to identify with the raw and intense honesty of jazz. The musicians
blowing their hearts out as they belted out a solo, the unpredictable notes and rhythms, and the
spontaneous truth that jazz musicians like Parker created became the main influence of Beat
writing.
Charlie Parker once said that “[m]usic is your own experience, your own thoughts, your
wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn” (“About Charlie ‘Yardbird’
Parker”). That was what Kerouac wanted to convey with his writing: it is his experience,
thoughts, and wisdom, it was what he lived. Kerouac did not believe in editing and revisions. In
his piece “Essentials of Modern Prose,” Kerouac says “[n]ever afterthink to ‘improve’ or defray
impressions” (57). He believes that, like a jazz player, a writer, or any artist, should just blow.
Like Parker on the saxophone, blowing his life out of his instrument, Kerouac blows his life out
in words onto paper. He yells at us: “Blow as deep as you want to blow” (“Essentials of Modern
Prose” 57). Tell your experiences, full of pain and triumph, to the world. Tell it how it was and is
and you can never go wrong. Improvise. The air is open to new sounds; the paper is clean and
ready to be written upon. Be an individual and speak your mind. This is the message behind jazz.
Each musician has the chance to do a solo, in which each musician is trying new sounds and
combinations, breaking old conventions and rules, to express themselves. This is the goal of his
prose: to go off on an experience like a jazz musician who “valued the intense moment over
tradition, intuition over reason shaped by education” would (Wilson 302).
Kerouac’s On the Road can be viewed as a long soliloquy or solo. The novel is a long
narrative on Kerouac’s views and thoughts on all of the things he experiences. Though the
antihero of the story is Dean Moriarty, the real concentration is on how Kerouac expresses his
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thoughts, feelings, and reactions to Dean and their adventures together. Leo Braudy suggests that
“[b]y including himself as a character and thereby individualizing his own perspective, Kerouac
can more easily celebrate the autonomy of characters like Dean,” as well as his own – which
emphasizes that the story is Kerouac’s take on the shared experiences (110). Kerouac takes these
happenings and memories and writes one long soliloquy that turns into a narrative about his
adventures – just like when Charlie Parker does a solo in the middle of the song, blowing for
minutes at a time, telling the story from his side of the stage, from his horn. Furthermore, this
solo is improvised, on the spot, with Kerouac suggesting that the artist must rely on “form [to
take] care of itself as it spontaneously flows through the mind and then through the musical or
writing instrument” (Whaley 34).
Parker, with his fast, unpredictable, in-the-moment expressions, was the king of jazz in
Kerouac’s eyes. When Parker stood on the stage with his saxophone in hand, nobody was purer.
With his lips on the mouthpiece of his golden alto, his soul could not lie. Every note he picks is
perfect for that moment, chosen by him for him: “improvisation…provides access to the
moment” (Mortenson 312). There is no time to go back and edit or revise, he just keeps on
playing. This is a jazz musician. As Kerouac describes in the Paris Review, a jazz artist is a man
“drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he
does, his sentence, his statement’s been made.” To Kerouac, jazz was a pure art form. He
projected jazz ideals into his writing. He did not believe in editing and having to stop expressing
himself before he feels fully expressed. In fact, while writing On the Road, Kerouac taped pieces
of paper together when he typed on his typewriter so that he would not have to change the paper
in mid-expression, fearing that the disruption of changing the paper could alter in the current
flow of consciousness. This is the goal of his prose: to go off on an experience like a jazz
musician who cared about getting his sound out the way he felt it needed to sound, despite
musical traditions and rules. As Kerouac states in his “Essentials for Spontaneous Prose,” a
writer should blow as deep as he wanted to blow. He called this style “spontaneous prose:”
writing whatever comes to mind in that particular moment or recollection. His spontaneous prose
was in tune with jazz concepts, such as taking the now and making it beat, or jazz. This
methodology of expression, and the immediacy of its creation, calls for the defiance of rules. For
if conventions were kept in mind in the midst of creation, there would be limitations in
expression: “[b]oth Parker’s sequence of melodic ideas and Kerouac’s sequence of word pictures
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seem to be conceived and simultaneously expressed, whole and intact, not in accord with
convention, but with their own implicit logic of structure and timing” (Whaley 33).
Like jazz musicians who used unconventional measures and beats, the Beats found
beauty in the unprecedented and unexpected. One of the most famous lines from On the Road is
“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 who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing” (On the Road 5-6). Kerouac used unconventional sentence structures and formatting in
his books to help him better convey his story, as well as the sense of continuity. In On the Road,
Kerouac’s style of prose is first revealed to the public eye. Though heavily edited, his writing
revealed long sentences that seemed to stop when Kerouac ran out of breath. He ignored
grammatical nuances and wrote literarily erroneous long sentences. For when one’s living life,
there is no time to stop, except to take a gulp of air, and Kerouac’s writing reflected that. He
wrote as he spoke, letting his emotion out, speaking as an excited child would, rambling until he
ran out of breath. Though the published version received a lot of attention in regards to the
grammatical composition, his original scroll was more daring. In his original text, Kerouac’s
writing is even more jazz-like. Kerouac did not separate his paragraphs in the first version of On
the Road. The loss of indentations formed the rhythm and continuous flow of the text and its
characters. And since Kerouac’s prose is focused on in-the-moment ideologies, this format
created a feeling of continuity. Furthermore, in areas that the published book has commas and
semicolons, were once dashes and ellipses to better accentuate his manner of speech. Though
much of his work was edited by publishers due to literary standards, there are those who argue
that the piece has lost a lot of its aesthetic appeal due to the loss of the original flow. In not
conforming to the canon’s literary expectations, Kerouac was able to create something beautiful.
Perfectly exemplifying these characteristics is the last sentence on the last page in On the
Road. A line made famous from Kerouac reading it to the piano playing on The Steve Allen
Show, it is a virtuosic solo, a soliloquy. It is also an unconventionally long sentence, imitative of
a jazz musician’s last long-breathed blow. All the while it remains Kerouac’s true feelings at that
moment, sitting there, thinking of Dean Moriarty:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river
pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that
rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road
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going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now
the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight
the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star
must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just
before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups
the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to
happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean
Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of
Dean Moriarty. (On the Road 301)
This last line is Kerouac’s conclusion to his adventure: it is the closing soliloquy of reflection.
Kerouac respected jazz, just as he respected his generation. All Kerouac had was his own
experiences and his own subjective perspective; that is all anybody has. Conforming to others’
worldviews is a pseudo reality of comfort. Humans must face each other head-on and speak the
language and see the ways of the now. What is different is only different because you are not
used to it. Kerouac and jazz embraces all the good and bad that make up this world to create
something beautiful and human. In expressing oneself honestly, in the moment, one can create
beauty out of chaos. Kerouac’s prose uses jazz concepts, such as having virtuosic solos,
immediate expression, and unconventional ideas to create a new form of writing that expounds
human life in an honest and beatific manner.
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Works Cited
“About Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker.” Cmgww.com. Estate of Charlie Parker, n.d. Web.
March 1, 2011.
Braudy, Leo. “Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners.” Harvard Guide to
Contemporary American Writing. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1979. 84-152. Print.
“Jack Kerouac.” Beatmuseum.org. The American Museum of Beat Art, n.d. Web. March
1, 2011.
Kerouac, Jack. “Essential of Modern Prose.” The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann
Charters. New York: Penguin Group, 1992. 57. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Print.
Mortenson, Erik R. "Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On
the Road." College Literature 28.3 (2001): 51-67. MLA International
Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 30 Jan. 2011.
Berrigan, Ted. “Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41.” The Paris Review 43 (1968): n.
pag. Web. March 1, 2011.
Swartz, Omar. The View From on the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Print.
Whaley, Preston. Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the
Transformation of U.S. Culture.” Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. 1-49. Print.
Wilson, Steve. "'Buddha Writing': The Author and the Search for Authenticity in Jack
Kerouac's On the Road and The Subterraneans." Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of
Contemporary Thought 40.3 (1999): 302-315. MLA International Bibliography.
EBSCO. Web. 23 Feb. 2010