Miles Davis recorded this “best selling jazz record of all time” in 1959 with the Miles Davis Sextet, which included Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto saxophone, and Paul Chambers on bass.
For more information on the recording of this album, check out NPR’s Jazz Profile of it at:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/04/10862796/miles-davis-kind-of-blue
This is the best known piece from jazz pianist and composer’s platinum album TIME OUT with saxophonist Paul Desmond (who wrote “take five”), bassist Eugene Wright, and drummer Joe Morello.
Although he died relatively early in the Beat Movement (1956), artist Jackson Pollock is considered a central figure in the art of the beats. Alfonso Ossorio said of him: “Here I saw a man who had both broken all the traditions of the past and unified them, who had gone beyond cubism, beyond Picasso and surrealism, beyond everything that had happened in art.” This 1950 piece, “Lavender Mist” is considered seminal in his body work. Harold Rosenberg called it “…not a picture, but an event.”
Source:
National Gallery of Art Online http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/artist2.shtm
Listen to the author read this quintessential beat poem.
“…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, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Sometimes called the “inventor of the Beats,” writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was born to a devoutly Catholic French-Canadian family in Lowell Massachusetts. He went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, but dropped out. While in New York he befriended Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs. The three of them would form the core of the Beat Movement and their adventures together, along with Neal Cassady, would inspire Kerouac’s writing. Kerouac is best known for his novel On The Road, which was published in 1957. Kerouac continued to write, describing his experiences with Buddhism (to which he converted) in Dharma Bums and writing and narrating the film Pull My Daisy, among others, but never achieving the same level of acclaim that he had with On the Road. His drinking habit grew progressively worse, and he died at age 47 from complications from alcoholism, but not before creating more than two dozen published works and inspiring generations to come.
Source:
“Jack Kerouac” http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html
Levi Asher “Literary Kicks” http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html
“Jack Kerouac came to embody the counter culture and when he published On the Road, it became the Bible of the counter culture generation.” –Jay Parini
Although he had been toying the story for years, the legend is that Kerouac wrote his final draft of On the Road in three weeks. Kerouac, a fast typer (averaging 100 wpm), did not like having to stop typing to change the individual sheets of paper, so he replaced them with a 120 foot scroll of typing paper, which contains the original manuscript of the book (except for the very end which was eaten by a Cocker Spaniel according to Kerouac’s note). Based on his experiences traveling the country with Neal Cassady (the model for character Dean Moriarty), Kerouac’s novel was an overnight success. Kerouac use a style of writing that he said was inspired by Jazz called “spontaneous prose.” To hear an example of this style of writing, watch the video in which Kerouac reads the final page of On the Road.
Sources:
Jack Kerouac: Biography.com http://www.biography.com/people/jack-kerouac-9363719?page=1
Andrea Shea “Jack Kerouac’s Famous Scroll ‘On the Road’ Again” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11709924
This is a track from iconic beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac and entertainer Steve Allen’s spoken word album Poetry for a Beat Generation released in 1959. Allen plays piano while Kerouac reads his own work.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…”
Poet and “Founding Father of the Beat Generation” Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was born in Newark, New Jersey and attended Columbia University (getting suspended at one point and joining the Merchant Marines). While in New York, he met Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs, and the three of them formed the core of the Beat movement. He was arrested after driving a car full of stolen good and plea bargained his way into a stay at Columbia Psychiatric Institute. There he met Carl Solomon to whom he would later dedicate Howl. He travelled the United States and Mexico. Some of these adventures are chronicled in ON THE ROAD and are attributed to the character Carlo Marx. In 1955 Ginsberg read a part of “Howl” in San Francisco and the poem caught the eye of publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In 1956, HOWL AND OTHER POEMS was published, sparking an obscenity trial that Ginsberg ultimately won. This poem catapulted him into literary celebrity. Ginsberg wrote and travelled extensively (often with his longtime partner Peter Orlovsky) over the next several decades and was politically active on a variety of topics. He also converted to Buddhism. He died from liver cancer at the age of 70.
Sources:
PBS American Masters: Allen Ginsberg http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ginsberg_a.html#
Allen Ginsberg.org http://www.allenginsberg.org/index.php?page=lifeline
Wilborn Hampton “Ginsberg, Master Poet of the Beat Generation, Dies at 70.” NYT http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0603.html
Rolling Stone calls Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) a “Greenwich Village folk-blues-jazz institution.” He has recently had a resurgence in popularity as the inspiration for the title character of the Coen Brothers’ INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. This song, “St. James Infirmary” was originally on his 1959 album GAMBLER’S BLUES. Here is a 1997 performance of the song by Ronk, recently released in the 2013 retrospective album DOWN IN WASHINGTON SQUARE.
Source:
David Browne “Meet the Folk Singer who Inspired ‘Inside Llewyn Davis.” Rolling Stone 2013 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/meet-the-folk-singer-who-inspired-inside-llewyn-davis-20131202
As You Like It at University of Evansville 2014 