MUS 209 Emerson College Bebop is Nowhere Article Discussion Read the two articles “Bebop is Nowhere” and “To Be or Not to Bop: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”

MUS 209 Emerson College Bebop is Nowhere Article Discussion Read the two articles “Bebop is Nowhere” and “To Be or Not to Bop: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the Culture of Bebop and Rhythm’n’ Blues”, both found in the articles module. Both articles address a reaction to Bebop as a counter culture phenomenon, one positive and one negative. Write a 1.5 page response to these articles answering the following questions.1. What where the significant arguments against the validity of Bebop? How does this reflect the generation gap in jazz at the time, in America at the time? 2. Bebop seemed to be inspiration for Kerouac’s writings and for a new Counterculture generation. What was this based in, romanticizing rebellion? the mythology of the jazz musician? genuine fan interest? Highlight any artistic similarities or connections in approach or process between bop and beat writing. 3. Bebop and the relationship to Beat writing serve as a model for several generations of counterculture movements throughout the rest of the 20th century. What other revolutions of music had connections to other art (visual, film, fashion, writing etc) movements? What, if any, similarities do you find between Bebop as a counterculture catalyst and other later styles of music in their relationships to other arts, to society, to the music industry etc? To Be or Not to Bop: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the Culture of Bebop and Rhythm
‘n’ Blues
Author(s): David Hopkins
Source: Popular Music, Vol. 24, No. 2, Literature and Music (May, 2005), pp. 279-286
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3877650
Accessed: 07-01-2019 17:55 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

Terms and Conditions of Use

Don't use plagiarized sources. Get Your Custom Essay on

MUS 209 Emerson College Bebop is Nowhere Article Discussion Read the two articles “Bebop is Nowhere” and “To Be or Not to Bop: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”

Get an essay WRITTEN FOR YOU, Plagiarism free, and by an EXPERT! Just from $10/Page

Order Essay

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Popular Music
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Popular Music (2005) Volume 24/2. Copyright @ 2005 Cambridge University Press, pp. 279-286
doi:10.1017/S0261143005000474 Printed in the United Kingdom
To Be or Not to Bop: Jack
Kerouac’s On The Road and the
culture of bebop and rhythm
blues
David Hopkins
The appearance of On the Road in 1957 signalled the emergence of a new movement in
American literature, soon to be called the Beat Generation (Kerouac 1957). Along with
Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ of 1956, Kerouac’s work brought a new awareness of an
intellectual counter-culture bubbling under the conservative surface of 1950s
America. The content of these writers’ poetry and prose, with its open and honest
depiction of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual activity, drug abuse, petty crime, and social
deviance was enough to create a sensation, but it is the style that gives the works their
permanence and interest today. Kerouac himself used the term ‘bop prose’ to describe
his efforts to reform fiction along the lines of avant-garde jazz, where immediacy of
expression and technical fluency combine to open new possibilities, supposedly not
present in more traditional methods of composition.
The association of On The Road and bebop is so strong that almost all critics today
approach the novel by discussing its style and structure in terms of what is generally
understood to be the bebop style.’ But the composition history of the novel creates
some problems that suggest severe limits to this approach. The events of the semiautobiographical novel take place during the years 1947-1949, and were originally
recorded by Kerouac in his diaries. (Some of the diary texts, including some that cover
the same events, were later published in Visions of Cody; Kerouac 1993.) In the 1950s,
Kerouac revised his diaries for publication, imposing a clearer, though not in any
traditional sense novelistic, order upon them. This creates a gap, introducing, as it
were, a third character into the text. The participant and contemporary observer of the
action, Sal Paradise, is joined by the organiser of the information, narrator-Sal, who,
from the perspective of ten years later has knowledge and perspective he can’t resist
including. One of the most important aspects of this is in the discussion of music.
Close discographical reading of the novel shows that much of the music discussed
would not be considered bebop under today’s definition. Narrator-Sal knows the
consensus definition, but participant-Sal can’t have that perspective. Kerouac is
faithful to his own diaries in including much of the non-bop music, but can’t resist
‘improving’ participant-Sal’s knowledge and musical taste.
Also, approaching the novel only from a ‘stylistics of bop prose’ stand-
point ignores a wider musical culture of bebop, one including critics, historians,
accompanists and fans, to focus solely on the production of the soloist. Kerouac was
279
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
280 David Hopkins
certainly a dedicated fan and sometime critic of the music called bebop, but was not a
musical performer, so it is much more likely that he conceived of bebop as existing in
a wider cultural zone than merely the spotlight on the soloist.
‘At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America’
(Kerouac 1957, p. 14; note: all subsequent references are to this edition)
Early in the novel, with this pronouncement, narrator-Sal declares the importance of
the musical background of the culture to the novel. Indeed, 1947 would seem to be the
watershed year where bebop breaks from relative obscurity into critical, if not popular, attention. Since ‘classic’ bebop recordings by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,
Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and many others never appear on any Billboard
magazine charts of the era, clearly Kerouac is referring to music industry and media
‘buzz’ more than actual popularity. (It is also quite likely that he was including
another type of music that would no longer be recognised as ‘bop’.)
While both evolutionary and revolutionary arguments have been advanced for
the appearance of the bebop style, the identification of the style as radical and
radically opposed to established forms of popular music was used by the record
industry and the music media in an effort to improve sales of the music and of
magazines. The musicians themselves seldom, in interviews in Down Beat and other
jazz magazines, made any such claims, and indeed, their commitment to the classic
bebop style was far from absolute. By 1949, Charlie Parker was recording with a string
section and Dizzy Gillespie was playing Latin jazz. Established ‘swing’ artists were
recording in the bebop style. The conflict between an old style and bebop may have
helped attract attention to the new style, but it wasn’t ultimately the relatively
unpopular bebop that killed off the dinosaurs of swing, but a new version of the blues.
The more successful challenger to the throne of the swing bands was ‘jump’, or
‘jive’, popularised especially by the 1940s Count Basie band, Louis Jordan’s Tympani
Five, and others. From today’s perspective, this music is a kind of proto-R&B,
quick-tempoed, blues-based honking and shouting. In fact, the word ‘bebop’ and the
expression ‘blowing one’s top,’ were popularised more from this music than from
what is now considered bebop. Helen Humes’ ‘Be Ba Ba Le Ba Boogie’ (1946), Lionel
Hampton’s ‘Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop’ (1946), and ‘Blow-Top Blues’ (1947) were much
more popular with the record-buying public than anything by Gillespie or Parker. It
would be easy in the 1940s to mistake the meaning of the term bebop, or to conflate the
two styles into one more or less aggressive-sounding performance style.
Even a passionate music fan, as Kerouac certainly was, could not be expected to
know every record on every minor label, so if he, too, associated the term bop with
more than one musical style, or rather, with a musical attitude and not a musical style,
then the meaning of ‘bop prose’ must be broader than usually thought.
‘Blowing their tops before a screaming audience’ (p. 113)
Kerouac began revising his diaries into what would become On The Road in 1951.
From even that short perspective, several things about bop had become clearer.
Narrator-Sal intrudes into the action at several points to supply music-related context.
This serves the double function of establishing the authority of narrator-Sal as an
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Middle Eight 281
aficionado of the music and establishing the ‘coolness’ of participant-Sal, who was a
fan of these things before their significance was critically assumed. Narrator-Sal tells
us early on that at the time of the action, ‘bop was somewhere between its Charlie
Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis’ (p. 14).
Of course, Miles Davis was actually a member of the band on the Dial Records sessions
that produced ‘Ornithology’, and his 1949 sessions, later known as ‘the birth of the
cool’ sessions do show two clearly definable stages in the development of modern
jazz, as any reader of 1957 would be expected to know. Interestingly, though, nowhere
in the text is participant-Sal shown to be listening to either of these musicians. The
purpose of the historical context is to prove a later Sal’s credentials.
Similarly, introducing the pianist George Shearing, who appears twice in the
novel, narrator-Sal explains, ‘these were his great 1949 days before he became cool
and commercial’ (p. 128). Actually, Shearing’s greatest commercial success came in
early 1949 with his recording of ‘September in the Rain’, which, although almost
completely lacking in bop-styled energy, is coupled with a very bop ‘Bop, Look, and
Listen’ on its B-side. Again, loyalty to the diaries requires that participant-Sal attend
Shearing concerts twice, but given that fact that by 1957, Shearing was more considered a fairly interesting, ‘pretty’, player than a pioneer of bebop, narrator-Sal must
find a way to explain the discrepancy. Shearing is too important to participant-Sal to
be ignored, but too insignificant in jazz history to be included without the addition of
some conditions by narrator-Sal.
Later still, narrator-Sal supplies a brief and highly selective history of jazz,
ending with a description of the band that he calls ‘children of the bop night’
(pp. 239-40). This capsule history, a ‘great man’ version that overlooks many significant musicians in favour of a few famous soloists, again serves to make it seem that
participant-Sal is at the centre of something exciting. Strangely, he never bothers to tell
the name of the band he sees, the inheritors of a tradition he wants to show he knows
well. Presumably, they are not later well known enough to supply the necessary
quotient of cool. Indeed, participant-Sal sees this band in Chicago, which at the time
was the scene of a vibrant electrified blues boom. These ‘children of bop’ may really
have been playing Chicago blues.
Participant-Sal is much more catholic in his musical experience than narrator-Sal
wants to emphasise. At various times he expresses appreciation for simple hillbilly
music, opera (Fidelio in Leadville), cowboy music, Mexican ‘campo guitar’ music,
mambo, and pop music from the radio. On the West Coast, Sal hears a band perform
what is clearly ‘honking’ sax-centred R&B, described very much the way Big Jay

McNeeley’s performance style was usually described. They follow this rousing
performance with a slow ballad, ‘Close Your Eyes’, an R&B chart hit for Herb Lance in
1949. Other Lance songs were covered by Frankie Laine, and this one would not sound
strange if sung by Perry Como or any other contemporary pop vocalist, but still, to Sal,
it was ‘the greatest’ (p. 198). While in Oakland and San Francisco in the late 1940s, Sal
seems to have had more contact with that region’s R&B scene, and not to have heard
any bebop, nor to have complained about its absence.
While there, one night, participant-Sal is horrified at the sight of a ‘white fairy
hipster’ (p. 200) who tries to play bebop style drums while sitting in with an R&B
band. It is simply inappropriate for the situation. Denzil Best’s drumming with
George Shearing, described in a similar way, is praised, but in a different context,
behind a ‘big solid foghorn blues’, bebop drumming shows a lack of understanding.
Participant-Sal’s horror is proof of his own authentically appropriate response to the
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
282 David Hopkins
band. Narrator-Sal does not step in to comment on whether or how ‘big solid foghorn
blues’ fits into the history of bop, because it doesn’t.
The overt showmanship honking of that band (also not named) is praised
but would seem to contradict narrator-Sal’s personal preference for subdued
excellence, based on technique, knowledge and experience. The exaggerated aspects
of the show imply mere performance of passion, as opposed to technically controlled,
sincere passion.2 The issue of sincerity and performance underlies several parts of
the novel, and participant-Sal is seldom able to ‘perform’ with the same passion
and manic intensity he appreciates in Dean, partly because of his dual role as actor
and commentator/diarist. His most manic, Dean-like behaviour in the novel, in
the whorehouse in Gregoria, anticipates his exhaustion as the novel is ending. As
a solo performer in Dean’s style, he can’t sustain the energy and tension like Dean
had.
Participant-Sal’s proper role, then, while ultimately secondary to the role of
narrator-Sal in the production of the novel, is not as soloist, but as accompanist to
Dean’s sustained solo performance. He even plays drums! (pp. 119, 134) And, like a
drummer, he keeps time (although Dean claims that they all ‘know time’) and
provides a superstructure of order that others, mainly Dean, can riff against. His
role as drummer to Dean’s soloist helps to explain the stylistic use of repetition,
something valued far more in R&B and pop music than in the bebop narrator-Sal
loves so much, but something that is present nonetheless in bebop, where the
drummer keeps time and repeats, occasionally ‘dropping bombs’ to shake up the
overall group’s performance.
Participant-Sal certainly sees himself as a performer, or at least, desires to
perform, but his self-consciousness limits his ability to ‘blow his top’. Observing kids
playing neighbourhood baseball in Denver, participant-Sal says, ‘Never in my life as
an athlete had I ever permitted myself to perform like this in front of families and girl
friends and kids of the neighbourhood, at night, under lights; always it had been
college, big-time, sober-faced: no boyish, human joy like this. Now it was too late’
(p. 181) Later, though, when participant-Sal and Dean get into a pick-up basketball
game, they play like ‘hotrock blackbelly tenorman Mad of American back-alley
go-music’, in contrast to their opponents’ ‘Stan Getz and Cool Charlie’ (p. 253). When
he can perform, it isn’t bebop that he plays, he plays along with Dean.
For in addition to being Dean’s accompanist, participant-Sal is Dean’s biggest
fan. He defends Dean when he is being most aggressively (and maybe justly)
attacked, by saying ‘he’s given all of you a damned good time just being himself’, and
‘. . I’ll bet you want to know what he does next and that’s because he’s got the secret
that we’re all busting to find .. .’ (pp. 194-5). This is certainly the same logic fans of
Charlie Parker used to rationalise his various personal and interpersonal failings. If
the quality of the performance is high enough, to the fan, no other considerations
apply.
As Dean’s biggest fan, participant-Sal is concerned with protecting and enhancing Dean’s reputation, seeing that his wild performance is not mistaken for that of a
‘moron or fool’. Dean is ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’, but in the same way that those adjectives
were applied to musicians operating outside of accepted norms. Dean ‘blows his top’
by suddenly throwing away a stable lifestyle, with family and job, to buy a car and go
out on the road again. Just three pages later, participant-Sal raves about a record by
Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, ‘The Hunt’, where they are ‘blowing their tops
before a screaming audience that gave the record a fantastic frenzied volume’ (p. 113).
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Middle Eight 283
To Sal, ‘blowing one’s top’ means extravagant expression of freedom from restraint.
The jam session recorded and sold as ‘The Hunt’ features, just as he says, extended
‘blowing’. It is not really in the classic 1947-1949 bebop style, and neither is it honking
R&B. Participant-Sal is likewise often between styles, and while there may be
some top-blowing in the diaries, the revisions of narrator-Sal make the style much
more conventional and easier to understand. Dean seems effortlessly to sustain a
performance that never comes naturally to the Sals.
Narrator-Sal treats Dean as he has treated musicians by historicising his actions
into periods – the ‘mature’ Dean, the ‘mystic’ Dean and finally the ‘angel’ Dean.
Overall, the whole novel can be seen as a validation by narrator-Sal of a decision by
participant-Sal to see in Dean a special performance, a special ability that was not
appreciated by others.
Both Sals, of course, have a much wider experience and education than Dean,
and thus more context for judging his action. Narrator-Sal is careful not to emphasise
this difference in social class, though. After all, the ‘arty types were all over America,
sucking up its blood’ (p. 41). Narrator-Sal would certainly have to be considered an
arty type, but participant-Sal, even though he gives writing lessons, tries very hard not
to be. As he says in a later context, ‘I won’t signify’, meaning, presumably, that he
won’t attach judgements and interpretations that create a distance between the
performer and the fan. Narrator-Sal’s act of ordering and telling, however, inevitably
does just that.
In fact, the Sals’ basically romantic interpretation of class (and race) causes him
to see Dean’s behaviour as more pure and natural than that of other middle-class,
educated, arty characters. When participant-Sal says he wishes he were a Negro or a
Mexican or a Jap, he is only saying that he believes working classes and minorities
have access to spontaneous feelings, understandings and ways of expression that
his middle-class background and education have separated him from. The bebop
musicians he idolises often disputed this romantic racism in published interviews,
but their objections seem not to have penetrated Kerouac’s romanticised image of
them, and this raises serious questions about his understanding of the real craft
of bebop, and, indeed, all music. It is therefore appropriate that participant-Sal is
an unquestioning fan and not a critic in his relationship with Dean, and also an
accompanist more than a soloist.
‘The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower’ (p. 113)
While participant-Sal is trying to deny the importance of class, education and experience (in order to prove, among other things, his authenticity), Dean is acutely aware
of it, and part of his performance involves demonstrating that he belongs with the
intellectuals around him. To extend the musical analogy, he is like a young musician
trying to show the more experienced players that he deserves a seat at the jam session.
The musical taste he expresses in the novel, while often more spontaneous and
impassioned than Sal’s (Dean is not a critic/historian) is more limited to styles he
imagines to be acceptable to those intellectuals. When they hear a Western radio
station, Dean says, ‘. .. the music is always cowboy hillbilly and Mexican, absolutely
the worst program in the entire history of the country…’ (p. 162). He identifies the
music as inappropriate for his intellectual friends, while at the same time trying to
show that he has grown out of this music he once listened to. Ironically, these are
This content downloaded from 199.94.80.42 on Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:55:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
284 David Hopkins
precisely the genres Sal had praised during his first, solo, road trip. Dean can’t hear
what participant-Sal heard.
In another incident, Dean ‘… got mad at a record little Janet was playing and
broke it over his knee: it was a hillbilly record’ (p. 219). To make up for this, Sal then
encourages Janet to break a record that Dean ‘valued’, ‘Congo Blues’, identified as a
Dizzy Gillespie record. (Actually it is a Red Norv…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment