March 12:
Jack Kerouac was born on this day in
1922, and on this day in 1955 Charlie "Bird" Parker died. In On the Road, Kerouac puts Parker atop his
list of jazz greats, those who were "children of the American bop
night." In "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," Kerouac goes
further, describing his own writing as an attempt to catch the rush and pause
of jazz:
No periods separating sentence-structures
already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas—but
the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician
drawing breath between outblown phrases) . . . . Not 'selectivity' I of expression but following free
deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought,
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical
exhalation and expostulated statement . . . .
Several of Kerouac's poems
in Mexico City Blues pay tribute to
Parker, ranking him "as important as Beethoven" and god of the jazz
clubs: ". . . And soon the whole joint is rocking / And everybody talking
and Charley Parker / Whistling them on to the brink of eternity . . . ." The
following excerpt from Kerouac's The
Subterraneans (1958) shows his spontaneous essentials in action:
. . . and up on the stand Bird
Parker with solemn eyes who'd been busted fairly recently and had now returned
to a kind of bop dead Frisco but had just discovered or been told about the Red
Drum, the great new generation gang wailing and gathering there, so here he was
on the stand, examining them with his eyes as he blew his
now-settled-down-into-regulated-design "crazy" notes . . . returning to the Red Drum for sets, to
hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself
directly into my eye looking to search if I was really the great writer I
thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from
other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos—not a challenging look but
the king and founder of the bop generation at least the sound of it in digging
his audience digging his eyes, the secret eyes him—watching, as he just pursed
his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work . . . .
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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