In my youth I traveled widely across
the world, most travel courtesy of the Navy. A jazz and blues enthusiast, I
cultivated friends with the same interests. When our ships made port visits, we
looked for clubs that played jazz and we found them everywhere. In Japan,
for example, we heard musicians who could copy exquisitely the sounds and phrasings
of American jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis,
not to mention the big band jazz and swing music of Benny Goodman, Duke
Ellington, and Stan Kenton. And we enjoyed similarly talented jazz groups in
other places.
In
October of 1960 my ship stopped at New York
and I went to 52nd and Broadway, to Birdland, a jazz club named for
Charlie “The Yardbird” Parker. I saw two groups, one headed by drummer Buddy
Rich, the other headlining Max Roach and Clifford Brown. I nursed a beer,
bought a pack of stale Pall Mall’s from a pretty
cigarette girl, and listened for hours to great jazz. That evening I was the
only sailor in the crowded club and I had a great time.
I
recalled all this after recently reading Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which became a cult novel
for the Beat Generation. Why the book attained cult status escapes me, but I
recommend it because it is well written and entertaining, a story of Sal
Paradise and his immoral friend Dean Moriority, who travel back and forth
across the US
and down to Mexico City.
Using
the argot of the times Sal and Dean visit jazz clubs and cities to “dig” the
music, the musicians, and the people, which for Dean is a search for a “pure
sense of being,” in reality a religious search for truth and meaning in life.
The improvised jazz solo provides this kind of experience. These solos, the
kind one can hear only imperfectly on recordings – they must be experienced
live – if done well by gifted players can carry listeners along from one point
to another the way speaking in tongues carries Pentecostal listeners to their
Beatific vision. G.K. Chesterton says that everyone is looking for God, even
the man entering a brothel, and Dean and Sal do that too.
I
never found the Lord listening to jazz but I had a lot of fun hearing great
music, much of which is now available on CD, and I had good friends like Kerouac’s
Dean Moriority who took me from one near disaster to another until I finally
decided to quit pushing my luck. I then found a good woman, got married, and
had a family, becoming the kind of bourgeois conformist that Beat Generation writers
and artists disdained and that spoiled 1960’s baby boomers ridiculed.
In
On the Road Kerouac does not
celebrate the Beat life of immorality and nonconformity and does not write with
the self congratulatory tone so common among baby boomers who go on and on
about the debauchery (to them the great causes) of the 1960’s; he just tells
his travel story.
In
fact, Kerouac, who died at age forty-seven in 1969, did not like the emerging
1960’s counter culture. Today, of course, a new counter culture has emerged consisting
of religious conservatives who value tradition and the wisdom of the ages over
Beat Generation and baby boomer hedonism. They know that Dean Moriority’s road
to a pure sense of being and the baby boomers’ road to Utopia are roads to
nowhere.
This was originally published in
the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee
on November 10, 2008
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