Jazz and African American Culture in Jac

"Jazz America": Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"
Author(s): Douglas Malcolm

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 85-110
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208820
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DOUGLAS MALC OLM
"Jazz America": Jazz and Afri

Culture in Jack Kerouac's On
n a 1995 review of Ann Charters's The Portab

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956, A
that Jack Kerouac's work "represents the m
iment in language and literary form undert
writer of his generation" (2). While Kerouac's p
"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," have liter
mired writers as different as William Carlos W
Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and William
erary experimentation was also modeled on his
improvisation. A number of Kerouac's biogr
course, have recognized this source; however, w
on the value of the influence of jazz on Kerouac
assumption that a direct transposition of theo
music to literature can be accomplished in the
proposes. The purpose of this study is to exa
and his best known work, On the Road, which
roll of paper in one "250-foot single paragraph"
light of the various generic rules that distinguis
of music. While jazz does play a significant rol
pact lies in the music's ideological, behavioral,
tions-in particular their roots in African Am
than in the direct application of its formal rule
Critical treatment of the jazz influence on K
etry has tended to explicate Kerouac's goals rat
damental generic questions about what constitu
it might reasonably serve as a literary model.
Contemporary Literature XL, 1 0010-7484/99/0001-

? 1999 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisc
86 CO N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
ing other critics like Edward Foster and Bruce Cook,

Beats "used the principal ideas of bebop playing an
to prose and poetry writing, creating a style some
prosody" (2). Robert Hipkiss is not entirely sanguine
of jazz on the Beats' work: "The jazz idiom with w
the Beats operated is ... in great measure responsi
spired blowing as well as the occasionally ecstatic ou
statement" (93). Malcolm Cowley, who persuaded V
On the Road, observes that the poems in Mexico City
strate that "Kerouac's analogy with jazz is exact. S
ruses read like scat singing played back at slow speed
for their musical values or their primary link to th
(qtd. in Gifford 190). Gerald Nicosia reports that K
Blues is "one of the most important poetic works in t
the twentieth century" and further can be regarded
best literary equivalents of musical blues" (412). In h
On the Road, Regina Weinreich, who along with Tim
the jazz influence on the novel in some detail, argue
"notion of improvisation informs the language of [h
exact technical level. Though Kerouac had neither th
a musician nor the critical vocabulary of a person le
ject of music, he clearly demonstrates a profound ide
creation of music with that of literary works" (8-9).
What is striking about this commentary is how lit
minology is employed by either the critics or Kerou
example, notes that in articulating his poetics Ker
uses the vocabulary of jazz to illustrate what he is tr
Yet in the passage from "Essentials of Spontaneou
lows, the so-called jazz vocabulary is colloquial and
ouac exhorts his fellow writers to "blow-on-subject
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other
of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement"
79). In his piece on Charlie Christian in Shadow and
of essays from the 1950s and early 1960s, Ralph Elli
jazz is much more than just musical technique and is
to African American culture, wherein each music
tion "represents . . . a definition of his identity:
member of the collectivity and as a link in the ch
MA LCOLM * 87
(234). Ellison calls for "more serious critical

brought to the subject (240), and subsequent
Baraka's (LeRoi Jones's) Blues People, Ben Sidran'
Murray's Stomping the Blues, and Craig Hansen
Changes, have built upon his central observation.
On the Value of Popular Music, Simon Frith follo
and offers a cultural theory of musical genre th
Kerouac's use of jazz in On the Road because it
of genre to embrace elements outside of the stri
gues that music can be regarded "as a coded expr
aims and values of the people to whom it appe
code can be broken down into the various elements that constitute a
musical genre, which Frith, adapting Franco Fabbri's theory, terms

"a set of musical events ... whose course is governed by a definite
set of socially accepted rules" (91). The formal and technical rule is
obviously important, but Frith itemizes four others: the social and
ideological, the behavioral, the semiotic, and the commercial. These
genre rules, except for the commercial, which is concerned with
"questions of ownership, copyright, financial reward and so on"
(93), provide a useful tool for comparing jazz and Kerouac's simula-
tion of it in his writing and in On the Road in particular.
The formal rules of jazz are of particular significance here since
they would presumably be the model for Kerouac's improvisations.
According to Frith, "the rules of musical form ... include playing
conventions-what skills the musicians must have; what instru-
ments are used, how they are played, whether they are amplified or
acoustic; rhythmic rules; melodic rules" (91). Improvisation is the
principal formal rule which distinguishes jazz from other types of
music. Leroy Ostransky defines jazz as "a variety of specific musical
styles [New Orleans, pre-swing, swing, bop, free jazz, and fusion]
generally characterized by attempts at creative improvisation on a
given theme (melodic or harmonic), over a foundation of complex,
steadily flowing rhythm (melodic or percussive) and European har-
monies" (Understanding Jazz 40). Composed works that have a jazz
flavor, such as George Gershwin's Rhadsody in Blue, are not jazz be-
cause they lack the essential quality of spontaneous improvisation.
"[J]azz," Ostransky laconically comments in The Anatomy of Jazz,
"did more for Gershwin than Gershwin did for jazz" (26).
88 CO N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
Although bop, the style of jazz that Kerouac trie

different from swing, which preceded it, the two sty
less founded in a very similar concept of improvisat
on what in jazz is referred to as the chorus: "What m
by the term chorus was simply that segment of a solo
entire thirty-two measure AABA chord progression
measure blues progression. A soloist might take o
perhaps take ten to twenty choruses" (Gridley 41). "C
sion" refers to the harmonic structure that underlie
instance, the traditional twelve-bar blues typical
monic movement from a tonic chord, C major, say,
on the fourth and fifth scale degrees of C major
melody is written in notes derived from these chord
played at the beginning and ending, the head and
known in jazz, of a performance. Between the head a
musician improvises on the tune's chord progress
progression to the tune is usually retained with exac
the selection, even during the improvised solos, simp
the entire progression ... over and over" (Coker 9).
In Understanding Jazz, Ostransky points out that t
appear to be spontaneous but requires a high deg
training. The improviser follows the chord progre
tated melody and
modifies and adapts, to his individual conception of jazz,

ments, rhythmic patterns, and even entire phrases he ha
mired. All these memories and impressions are assimilat
formed into music that is fresh, and often, when it is co
spirit of spontaneity, music that is new. The performer's ta
his material-however spontaneous his performance may
a way as to make it appear that the material is, in truth, his
(60)
Even so-called free jazz, it is worth noting, is governed by rules that

impose order on improvisation. In Jazz Styles, Mark Gridley ob-
serves that "even the most adventuresome, free-form improvisa-
tions are usually organized around tone centers, keys, modes, or
shifting tone centers" (218). An untrained individual may attempt to
improvise with absolute abandon, but whatever he or she produces
MALCO LM * 89
will not be jazz or even music, for that matter

by physical, technical, and aesthetic rules.
"In a sense," writes Stephen Nachmanovitch in
sation in Life and Art, "all art is improvisation
are presented as is, whole and at once; others
visations' that have been revised and restruct
time" (6). Jazz, of course, embodies the former
and writing the latter. However, there is, as
Stan Getz makes clear, a close similarity bet
and jazz: "It's like a language. You learn the al
scales. You learn sentences, which are the chord
extemporaneously with the horn" (qtd. in Magg
sical improvisation is like speaking a languag
understands its grammar; although clearly he o
municate to a listener, the listener is much free
course to interpret the sounds autonomously. M
unless a musician as well, cannot respond in a li
a particular language, however, understand i
ploy it verbally and in writing to communicate
cific ideas in an enormous range of contexts, o
only one. As poststructuralists like Michel
Barthes have pointed out, language is the ch
which we as human beings bring signification t
the consequence is that "The individual is alw
within a discourse that prescribes its own cont
trapment" (Patterson 261). Language texts are
by a host of social and economic factors, but
structured by grammatical rules that are incom
who don't understand a particular language.
Noam Chomsky: Some Observations on Jazz
Language Structure," linguists Alan Perlman
argue that these rules are similar to those used
"Improvising musicians are in much the sam
of a language. . . . Their improvisations are
knowledge of the available harmonic and me
by their technical skill and imagination in com
ing these possibilities in novel ways" (182).
While writing generally follows grammatical
90 * CONTEMPORARY LITERAT U R E
even more reliant on them than speech sin

aural clues to meaning-literary writing
guage whose chief purpose is not necessaril
dition to the rules of grammar, it is gover
taining to genre and to narration, plot, cha
Literary writing, as Linda Hutcheon notes
ernism, can even deliberately subvert itself
face intent of the language. Literature m
fore it is presented to an audience it is al
restructured over a period of time." Writte
is not improvised by jazz standards, since
poem is conceptually the same as reading
poets of the oral tradition, much like im
did not make up their songs extemporaneou
stock phrases and chose "forms in accordan
need" (DeVries 8). The writer, therefore, pe
jazz improviser whose language by compari
works within a highly sophisticated set of
meaning to his or her audience.
In "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," writt
parently instructs the writer to simply a
without regard for rules, a practice which
a deeper meaning to emerge:
Begin not from preconceived idea of what to s

jewel center of interest in subject of image at mo
outwards swimming in sea of language to perip
tion .... Never afterthink to "improve" or defra
writing is always the most painful personal wru
warm protective mind.
(58)
Although Kerouac mentions sketching in "Essentials of Sponta-

neous Prose," most critics have focused on its jazz references as the
guiding principle for his spontaneity. He refers several times to
"blowing (as per jazz musician)" and to "the vigorous space dash
separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath be-
tween outblown phrases)" (57). In a Paris Review interview some
years later, Kerouac explains this idea in more detail: "Jazz and bop,
MA LC O LM * 91
in the sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breat

phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath
does, his sentence, his statement's been made.... tha
fore separate my sentences, as breath separations of t
in Weinreich 9).
Since Kerouac's claim here is used by Weinreich t
"the equivalence of his writing and jazz at the technic
needs to be examined in more detail. Oddly, Kero
about saxophonists do not take into account other
anists, bassists, guitarists, drummers-whose instr
rely at all on breathing. It seems peculiar that these m
be concerned with using their vocabulary to cons
phrases, while the sax player's musical phrasing is lim
her breath. Larry Teal, in The Art of Saxophone Playin
that "methods must be devised to disguise breaks
lest they detract from the total effect. The aim of
habits is to improve the meaning of a phrase, rather
force" (92). An examination of transcribed solos from
improvisations, albeit on alto rather than tenor sax
musical phrasing was Parker's paramount concern
breathing was concealed in musical rests. A 1946 v
thropology," which has an AABA structure, is played
a metronome setting of three hundred beats per minu
tion of the first improvised chorus, Parker plays the
without a rest, the longest section without a rest in
solo (Parker 11). Played at this speed, the eight bar
into thirty-two beats, would be performed in just ov
an insignificant time for a professional sax player.
Kerouac's conception of improvisation relies mo
support than it does on a musical vocabulary. Breat
his sentences, and the primary structure that controls
is the physical dimensions of his writing surface. On t
stance, was initially written on the legendary roll of p
composed in an unavoidably linear fashion. His jazz
argues in the preface to Book of Blues, were "limited b
of the breastpocket notebook in which they are writte
of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus" (Blues 1
the physical limits of a roll of paper or the page of a
92 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E R AT U R E
the chorus that limits his improvisation show

of the harmonic function of the chorus in jazz
that matter, the purpose of grammatical ru
argue that the paper limits his spontaneity
physical properties of a particular instrument
tion. While it may be less difficult to play cer
phone, say, than on a trumpet, such a compar
instrument's mechanics rather than with mus
Both Tim Hunt and Regina Weinreich argu
despite Kerouac's declaration of abandon, do
quite rightly notes, "Any jazz improviser, eve
a Lester Young or a Charlie Parker, comes to h
but phrases, rhythmic ideas, and ways of atta
and recognizably his own" (146). Such charac
not structural like the chorus but are rather p
the same could be said with equal validity of th
authors Kerouac most admired. While Hunt
the chorus is "roughly equivalent to the role o
Spontaneous Prose" (146), Weinreich makes "
forms that become redefined and redevelope
tion of the series"(43-44) central to her argum
gues, becomes Kerouac's organizing principl
double movement in the act of composition, a
gresses and repeats at the same time.... Recu
interior structure of Kerouac's very language
his whole career reflected in large the more m
his language from book to book" (5). Althou
sion, which this insight is based on, remains c
repeated, the improvising musician is not m
the notated melody or by other musicians' im
words, what emerges is far from repetitious.
musicians, as I shall discuss later, to create new melodies based on
preexisting chord progressions. Parker's "Koko," for instance, fol-
lows the chord structure of the standard "Cherokee," but the
melody is completely different (Coker 13). Similarly, two novels
might be founded on the same literary convention, the quest myth,
for example, but be as different as On the Road and Don Quixote. The
chord progression may be repeated, moreover, but the improvisa-
M A L C O L M * 93
tion, whether of one or more choruses, is structured muc

erary narrative: "a solo should tell a story. This means it s
a clear exposition, development, climax, and release" (S
Kerouac's justification for his advocacy of spontaneou
described by Robert Hipkiss as "the Romantic belief that t
truth is in the basic human emotions [which] makes of sp
a primary value. The Romantic writer believes the closer o
to those emotions and the more purely they are commu
more affecting will be his statement" (93). This sponta
duction of written language is similar to the technique of
writing designed to delve into the writer's unconsciousnes
developed during the nineteenth century and later practic
riety of different writers, among them the surrealists (W
The writer simply writes, not paying attention to spelling
tion, or syntax and not following any preset plan. Author
alone, however, is not sufficient cause to treat a piece of w
literature rather than, say, as a diary or a disconnecte
words. Such an approach also makes the writer more vu
repeating cultural biases-as Ann Charters remarks
ouac's attitudes toward women and racial minorities in her intro-
duction to On the Road (xxx)-rather than contesting them. Interest-

ingly, Jung developed a similar method for unlocking the
unconscious that he called active imagination, which he wa
adamant be conducted strictly for therapeutic purposes, not fo
artistic ones (Hillman 133).
Clearly, Kerouac's use of jazz as a means of structuring his pros
was less formal than it was inspirational; indeed, it is possible tha
"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" has caused more obfuscatio
than it has brought clarity. While beyond the scope of this study
there are compelling reasons to view Kerouac's prose, regardless o
how it was composed initially, with its run-on sentences, its capital-
izations, its eccentric punctuation, its poetic repetition of sounds, as
developing out of the techniques of modernists like Joyce, Woolf
and Faulkner (Bartlett 125). Even Weinreich resorts to conventional
literary terminology in her analysis of Kerouac's prose (46-48). On
the Road, moreover, is far less stylistically adventurous than late
works and is usually regarded as representing a transition betwee
Kerouac's conventional first novel, The Town and the City, and later
94 ? CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E
ones like The Subterraneans and Visions of Cod

Road "was probably the most heavily edit
(French xii), and it shows considerable evid
the manner of a traditionally revised novel, o
use Nachmanovitch's term, rather than spo
though it was not published until 1957, the f
guised portrait of a period in Kerouac's life
1940s and ended in the early 1950s. It was o
roll of paper in April 1951, but on a later occ
out by hand (Nicosia 355). After it was acce
store the novel's freshness," Kerouac "type
rectly from the 120-foot roll [sic]" (Nicosia 5
was substantially edited by his publisher,
charged that the published version was an em
book (Clark 152).
Kerouac was most attracted to jazz becaus
sociations with African American culture, alt
later he does use the behavioral and semiotic
reflect his characters' development. Kerouac a
Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs
whom Norman Mailer, in his famous 1957 article "The White
Negro," characterized as outsiders to American life who were
treated by white culture as though they were black: "The hipster had
absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical
purposes could be considered a white Negro" (341). In a contempo-
rary response to Mailer's article, Ned Polsky comments, "The white
Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality, but
as the bringer of a highly specified and restricted 'cultural dowry,' to
use Mailer's phrase" (qtd. in Mailer, "Note" 369). However much he
identifies with African Americans, Kerouac is more interested in the
ideology of their "cultural dowry" than he is in the circumstances
that produced it. Indeed, his primitivist view of black culture, one
that shapes his use of jazz in On the Road, often misrepresents, exag-
gerates, and suppresses important elements of the music and the
culture in which it originated.
In part 3 of On the Road, while listening to jazz in a Chicago club,
Sal provides a brief but telling description of how bop developed
out of the music's history. Bop emerged through the influence of in-
MA LC O LM * 95
novative musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gille

nius Monk and by 1945 had pushed swing aside by
ers a completely different, more complex kind of jaz
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top

New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had para
days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Th
swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the
thing it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety-lea
glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broad
jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mot
in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the log
to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band th
Page and the rest-Charlie Parker leaving home and comi
and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie-C
in his early days when he was flipped and walked around i
playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also f
gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wr
(239)
He begins this history by identifying the musicians in the novel's

present as "the children of the great bop innovators" (239), the in-
heritors of jazz tradition.
Kerouac's conception of jazz history is conspicuous for being
based on individual stars rather than, say, the bands in which they
played or the cities in which their distinctive sounds originated. As
Leroy Ostransky makes clear in Jazz City, the musicians named by
Kerouac derived their styles in major part from the jazz communi-
ties in New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. While he
does mention Count Basie in connection with Kansas City and Char-
lie Parker, there is no mention of Duke Ellington. Albert Murray,
who regards jazz as developing out of "blues-break riffing and im-
provisation" (63), remarks that Ellington "achieved the most com-
prehensive synthesis, extension, and refinement to date of all the el-
ements of blues musicianship" (214), and that his work is "by far the
most comprehensive orchestration of the actual sound and beat of
life in the United States ever accomplished by a single composer"
(224). Although Ellington played the piano, his genius manifested it-
self collectively in his bands rather than as an individual performer.
Kerouac also seems to elide the New Orleans jazz from which Louis
96 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E R AT U R E
Armstrong emerged, perhaps because unlik

lowed-pre-swing, swing, and bop-the inno
ual performer was not as significant in New O
founded on "collective improvisation" (Ostr
Jazz 134). The characteristic which in Kerouac
toric musicians above all is their "madness";
cation is that the music they create derives no
but from visceral spontaneity. Hence Louis Ar
Adam from the "muds of New Orleans" and li
with the "mad musicians" of his hometown.
although suggestive of "logic," comes in "wa
Parker was "flipped" out of his mind, and Les
as "the saintly goof."
Kerouac regards these musicians not so mu
musical style-it is noteworthy that there is n
passage to any formal musical advances-but
ticular way of thinking, a vitalism which for
trait of bop. Ted Gioia, in The Imperfect Art: R
Modern Culture, demonstrates that this way o
calls the primitivist myth, is central to how m
has consistently viewed the music. Gioia trace
titude back to the "idealization and theoriza
French culture" (21), which as early as Montai
elevated the idea of the "noble savage." Gioia d
in the works of influential French critics H
Delaunay, and Robert Goffin, whom he calls "
of jazz studies" (28), and who helped shape j
ica. He finds it present in assumptions about j
parate as Louis Armstrong and Ornette Colem
impact is all the more damaging, given that
stated openly. Rather ... it colors critical ju
submitting itself to critical scrutiny" (47). As t
connection between jazz and the Romantic tra
Kerouac makes a direct reference in his histor
of the Ancient Mariner." Roy Eldridge's "gl
"glittering eye" of the Ancient Mariner as he
to tell his story.
The chief ideological characteristic of jazz fo
MALCOL M * 97
apparent "madness," derives not so much fro

white cultural assumptions about the music
ture. It is jazz's restless energy, bop being simpl
carnation, that Sal Paradise discovers wherev
which comes to symbolize for him the Ameri
what he calls "Jazz America" (204). In Chicago
the novel, for instance, Sal directly links bop an
ing of himself and his friends: "And as I sat the
sound of the night which bop has come to repre
thought of all my friends from one end of the
and how they were really all in the same vast b
thing so frantic and rushing-about" (14). It is th
ing-about" quality that Sal finds whenever he
nificantly, he finds it played on both coasts,
embracing the nation. In New York, for insta
plays while "a smile broke over his ecstatic fa
black alto saxophonist in San Francisco "ho
danced with his magic horn and blew two h
blues, each one more frantic than the other" (20
Sal also hears Slim Galliard, a madman, perfo
sessions at Jamson's Nook" thinks, "I never s
cians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end o
didn't give a damn" (177). Even the records he an
to, like "The Hunt" by Dexter Gordon and W
"fantastic frenzied" quality (113).
Of course, Kerouac, as a young white male,
his fascination with jazz. Almost as soon as ja
the early 1920s, young men who considered t
identified with jazz musicians' marginal social
white culture. While bop was more complex and
rebellious than their antecedents, the impulse o
men toward jazz had as much to do with ideo
particular style of music: "The white beboppers
as removed from the society as Negroes, but as
as Amiri Baraka puts it (188). This white identif
American experience, moreover, was far from e
Lawrence Levine sees a correspondence to the
Chicago in the 1920s-made up of musicians s
98 - CONTEMPORARY L I T E R AT U R E
Partland and Eddie Condon-who embraced

black culture with an abandon similar to that of the disaffected
youth of thirty years later: "There was a direct line between thi
group of white jazz musicians in the 1920s and the alienated yout
of the 1950s and 1960s whose rebellion owed so much, directly an
indirectly, to aspects of Afro-American culture, particularly its music
(Black Culture 296). Ben Sidran explains this appeal by arguing that
black music, by its very nature, is "revolutionary, if only because it
maintained a non-Western orientation in the realms of perceptio
and communication" (14).
Kerouac, as a French Canadian outsider whose first language was
French (Charters 24), seems to use jazz to serve his purposes as an
alienated white; as much and perhaps more than the music itself, it
is the ideological implications of bop and its performers, as per-
ceived by white culture, that attract him. Certainly, there is little ev-
idence in On the Road that Sal Paradise recognizes that the spirit of
jazz with which he identifies derives in good measure from the
African American history of slavery and racial prejudice. In part 3 of
On the Road, Sal walks through Denver "wishing I were a Negro,
feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ec-
stasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough
night" (180). Earlier, while Sal is living with his girlfriend Terry in
southern California, he picks cotton for a week or so as a way of
earning some money. Sal has difficulty doing the work, but he no-
tices an aging black couple who "picked cotton with the same God-
blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Al-
abama" (96). What is interesting is how he seems to appropriate the
experience, without demonstrating any understanding of the harsh
world that would have produced such expertise: "But it was beauti-
ful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, with
my face on the pillow of brown moist earth. Birds sang an accompa-
niment. I thought I had found my life's work" (96). He celebrates
manual labor while seemingly utterly unaware of slavery. At
roughly the same time as Kerouac was writing this scene in the early
1950s, blues musician James Cotton was recording "Cotton Crop
Blues" (Levine, Black Culture, 253).
Calling it a lament for "the loss of the Garden of Eden," James
Baldwin commented insightfully on the Denver episode from On the
M A LC O L M * 99
Road several years after the novel's publication. Afte

passage cited above, Baldwin remarks, "this is absolu
objectively considered, and offensive nonsense at tha
there is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin; and
thin because it does not refer to reality but to a dream"
musicians, who often relied on white culture for emplo
usually less direct than Baldwin in their disparagement
propriative attitudes as Kerouac's. Instead, they would u
engage in a subtle, often amusing commentary that whi
would rarely understand. This tradition originated in
America when slaves used music as a tool "to get ar
ceive the whites" (Levine, Black Culture 11). Bop mus
took advantage of the chorus's structure to augment
ironic observation. For them, improvisation would m
something that was entirely different from the notated
still based on the same chord progression:
For swing musicians, improvisation on "I Got Rhythm" mean

based on the melodic [notated] outline as well as the harmonic
tion; when a bop musician said "Rhythm"-an abbreviatio
only of the harmonic foundation, a foundation that could ser
number of original compositions. In Charlie Parker's recordin
Lore" and "Ornithology," for example, both numbers have the
basis in "How High the Moon."
(Ostransky, Understanding Jazz 203)
Bop musicians, like Parker and particularly Dexter Go

oped to a high degree the use of musical quotations a
vices. In Dexter Gordon: A Musical Biography, Stan Br
"Gordon's repeated recourse to brief excerpts from
standards, and even an occasional snatch of a classic,
judicious in execution, and genuinely funny in impact
While Kerouac seems unaware of the music's cultural and histor-
ical associations, not to mention its irony, he does fashion a dis-
course based on jazz's appeal to marginalized white males. For him
and his fellows, jazz and jazz musicians provided an insider's world
of arcane knowledge that distinguished them from straight society.
"Genres," as Simon Frith notes, "initially flourish on a sense of ex-
clusivity; they are as much (if not more) concerned to keep people
100 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E
out as in" (88). At Sal's brother's house in Virginia, Dea

Hunt" to the delight of his friends and the bewilderme
listeners:
The Southern folk looked at one another and shook their heads in awe.
"What kinds of friends does Sal have, anyway?" they said to my brother.
He was stumped for an answer. Southerners don't like madness the least
bit, not Dean's kind.
(113)
Kerouac is knowledgeable about certain aspects of bop and fre-

quently makes allusions that deliberately test his audience's under-
standing. At the beginning of the book, for example, he refers to bop
being "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period
and another period that began with Miles Davis" (14). For the jazz
cognoscenti, this reference would place the time between the 1946
release on Dial of Parker's "Ornithology" and the appearance of
Davis's album Birth of the Cool in 1950 (Cook and Morton 1009, 324).
Later, Kerouac elliptically refers to the death of a "bop clarinetist"
who "had died in an Illinois car-crash recently" (236). This can only
be Stan Hasselgard, who died outside Decatur, Illinois, in Novem-
ber 1948 (Collier 333). And making it clear to the reader that "these
were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial"
(128), Sal listens to George Shearing.
Kerouac's Romantic view of jazz also affects his presentation of
the behavioral rules of the genre which, according to Frith,
cover performance rituals in a widely defined sense. These are gestural

rules [that] ... determine the ways in which musical skill and technique,
on the one hand, and musical personality, on the other, are displayed....
Behavioral rules apply to audiences as well.
(92)
Aside from a number of unnamed ones in New York, Chicago, and

San Francisco, the two actual musicians whom Sal and Dean hear in
On the Road are Shearing and Slim Galliard. They hear Shearing both
in New York and later in Chicago, when he sits in with the band. On
the first occasion, which takes place as part of an extended New
Year's Eve party ushering in 1949, they go "to see Shearing at Bird-
land in the midst of the long, mad weekend" (128). It is worth point-
MA L C O L M 101
ing out that Kerouac seems to be conflating a later p

his desired chronology, since Birdland did not ope
year later, on December 15,1949 (Russell 276). They se
form later in San Francisco. It is curious that Keroua
reports, saw such greats as Thelonius Monk and Char
form-a Parker performance is described in The Sub
Kerouac wrote several choruses to Parker in Mex
should use Shearing and Galliard as representative
neither one is central to the bop movement. Shearing
white and English. What they do share, however, i
style that accentuates the appearance of musical po
tent with Kerouac's primitivist ideology.
At his Birdland performance, George Shearing se
control the natural elements: "Shearing began to play
rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'
wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and
sea" (128). Later, when Sal and Dean are in Chicago, Sh
innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mou
higher ... and everybody listened in awe and frigh
occasions, the music prompts Dean to call Shearing a
is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes!" (12
arrived" (241). Leonard Feather, who was Shearing's r
in 1949 and a pianist himself, describes Shearing's tec
time in more prosaic language: "By the time we were
first MGM recordings on 17 February [1949], George
new and unprecedented blend for this instrument
play four-note chords in the right hand, with the le
the right hand's top-note melody line, the guitar doub
and the vibes playing it in the upper register" (195).
Weinreich notes had little formal foundation in mus
effect that was created in an inspired but explicable m
moreover, is blind and like other blind pianists-Ray
Wonder, and Marcus Roberts, for instance seems t
sessed by the music; the blind have no visual models
stage mannerisms on and to the sighted appear to be r
exaggerated way to the music.
Slim Galliard's performance in San Francisco is even
sioned than that of Shearing. Galliard begins with ve
102 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E
in which he attaches the three-syllable line "orooni"

he says. Then he plays Ellington's "C-Jam Blues" on th
which "Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and pla
rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish
Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he
knows innumerable languages" (176). As with Shea
gards him as a divinity: "Now, Dean approached
proached his God; he thought Slim was God" (177). W
on Charlie Parker's Savoy recordings, Galliard was m
his eccentricity, both musical and verbal. Early in his
stance, "he worked as a solo variety act, playing g
dancing simultaneously: a bizarre combination whic
Galliard's comedic view of life" (Carr et al. 178). Thus Kerouac
seems to have selected both musicians because they are best suited
to his Romantic notion of bop.
The behavioral aspect of jazz performance is one of the devices
used by Kerouac to help shape the novel's narrative. On the Road in-
volves the quest of Sal Paradise for transcendent signification in his
life, what one critic calls the "Dionysian ideal" (Bartlett 122). "This
can't go on all the time-this franticness and jumping around," he
says to Dean. "We've got to go someplace, find something" (116). In
part this frantic search is characterized physically through travel, but
it is also apparent in their drug experiences, in their conversations, in
their relations with each other and with women, and, of course, in
jazz. Each of these circumstances reflects a definite shape that is char-
acterized by increasingly frantic behavior which ultimately leads to
a kind of deflation. Warren French, for instance, argues that "the rep-
etition of the inflation-deflation pattern of the individual sections
and the work as a whole" gives the novel much of its power (88).
Each of the novel's first four parts concludes with Sal, after having set
out in pursuit of truth-"somewhere along the line the pearl would
be handed to me" (11)-returning home disillusioned. At the end of
part 1, Sal has to beg money for the bus to get home. Part 2 ends with
Dean and Sal parting: "It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking
we'd never see one another again and we didn't care" (178). Sal and
Dean at the end of part 3 have been reduced to a state of debauchery
in which they are almost swept away in the debris of a "horror-hole"
theater where they have spent the night (245), and at the end of part
MA L C O L M 103
4, Sal, who is sick in Mexico City, is deserted by

better I realized what a rat he was" (303).
In part 5, Sal meets Laura, agrees to settle dow
Dean much as Peter renounces Christ after his ar
their way to a "Duke Ellington concert at the Me
(308) and, because his friend Remi won't coopera
give Dean a ride. It is noteworthy that this inci
place as they are on their way to see Ellington. The
can culture from which jazz derived favored
which was participatory, unlike the Western tra
music, which has sacralized the performer and pr
involvement (Levine, Black Culture 203). In jazz cl
performers were not separated from one another
pation in the music was expected. Craig Hansen
that this attitude derives from the call-and-respo
African American sacred music and work songs,
teners to be "understood as collaborators rather than an 'audience'
in the Euro-American sense" (207). For Sal, however, this fracture in
the rules of performer-audience separation governing white music
is another indication of jazz's franticness. At the Shearing Birdland
performance, for instance, the pianist "was conscious of the mad-
man behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and im-
precations" (128). Slim Galliard, after playing, actually sits with
Dean and Sal: "I sat there with these two madmen" (177). The black
audiences are also highly participatory: "it was a mad crowd. They
were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and
wild eyes.... A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones
at the man's hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, 'Ee! ee! ee!"'(197).
The Ellington concert at the Met, however, suggests that by the
end of the novel such wildness has been eliminated from Sal's life.
Lawrence Levine argues that as the United States experienced an
enormous influx of immigrants during the latter half of the nine-
teenth century, social elites used culture as a means of organizing
and making sense of the newcomers: "the response of the elites was
a tripartite one: to retreat into their own private spaces whenever
possible; to transform public spaces by rules, systems of taste, and
canons of behavior of their own choosing; and, finally, to convert the
strangers so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections
104 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E
emulated those of the elites" (Highbrow 177). What evo

erarchical system of highbrow culture in which audien
readers and visitors to art galleries and museums, w
approach the masters and their works with prope
proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation
mere entertainment was the goal" (146). The sacralizati
was accompanied by a system of rules that, in the c
musical expression, for instance, prevented latecomers
diately taking their seats, forced women to take off l
frowned on applause after arias (190).
Ellington's performance in the early 1950s at the
Opera, one of the bastions of highbrow culture, occurs
historical moment when jazz was being transformed f
brow to the highbrow. Ellington's swing audience had
rated by then, and jazz, as David Hajdu, the biographer
arranger Billy Strayhorn, notes, "was evolving into an
(150); while it marked the direction of jazz for the rem
decade, bop attracted a much smaller audience than sw
or popular art," Levine comments, "is transformed int
high art at precisely that time when it in fact becomes e
when it becomes or is rendered inaccessible to the type
appreciated it earlier" (Highbrow 234). Ellington's Met a
gests that jazz has been accepted as highbrow culture, an
formance is governed by regulations similar to tho
music. The institutionalization of jazz at the conclusion
mirrors Sal's commitment to Laura and to a more conventional life.
Although jazz and Sal have changed substantially by the end of

the novel, Sal's attendance at the Ellington concert is consistent with
his sacralization of jazz throughout On the Road. Characteristic of his
Romantic instincts, Kerouac makes the music meaningful by dis-
covering transcendent qualities in jazz improvisation. This process
belongs to Frith's final category of genre, the semiotic. Its rules are
essentially rules of communication, how music works as rhetoric; such

rules refer to the ways in which "meaning" is conveyed.... How is "truth"
or "sincerity" indicated musically? ... Rules here, in other words, concern
musical expressivity and emotion.
(91)
M A L C O L M * 105
It is noteworthy that the way Kerouac invests jazz music w

ing is not exceptional but is, in fact, part of a broader histo
nomenon. "Romanticism, which has stimulated our aesth
sciousness in so many respects," wrote John Huizinga in
also been the chief promoter of an ever-widening appr
music as a thing of the deepest value in life" (188).
The sacralized quality of jazz for Sal and Dean clearly e
two incidents, in San Francisco and then in Chicago, wh
to jazz clubs. Both places feature many of the behavior cha
tics, such as audience participation, of traditional jazz perf
In San Francisco, the crowd is anarchic-"Everybody w
and roaring" (197)-and in Chicago, the musicians are a
maniacal, entirely taken over by the music: "The sad d
completely goofed, staring into space, chewing gum,
rocking the neck with Reich kick and complacent ecst
And yet the music is not entirely without order and m
tenor saxophone player in San Francisco, for instance, s
Your Eyes" in a way that expresses the "pit and pruneju
beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man" (199); afte
sits in a corner and cries. Both he and an alto player in th
possess a more mysterious quality: "the tenorman had it an
body knew he had it" (197). The next day Dean remarks th
player was able to hold "IT" for longer than anyone he has
explains that as the player improvises, suddenly
"he gets it-everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks

carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substanc
lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of i
hashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come b
do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the
that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT-" Dea
go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
(206)
"IT" then appears to be some enigmatic aspect of the music that

unites the musicians and listeners in a common purpose and appar-
ently raises the moment to transcendent heights.
Stephen Nachmanovitch remarks that such a union is characteris-
tic of all improvisation: "The time of inspiration, the time of techni-
106 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
cally structuring and realizing the music, the time of playin

the time of communicating with the audience, as well as
clock time, are all one. Memory and intention (which postula
and future) and intuition (which indicates the eternal pre
fused" (18). Nachmanovitch also remarks on the similarity
what is produced by improvisation and by Buddhism: "B
call this state of absorbed, selfless, absolute concentration sa
(52). In Mexico City Blues, Kerouac, who according to Cha
"a self-taught student of Buddhism" (190), even compare
Parker to Buddha (Nicosia 488). What Kerouac is intuitive
nizing in his celebration of "IT" is that order is, indeed, an im
part of the jazz improvisation which appears to emerge out o
ingness. Anthony Storr makes a similar point: "Although
and play have a necessary element of spontaneity, both are a
cerned with order and with form" (116). It is the paradoxica
of freedom and order, what Nachmanovitch calls "a harmon
posite tensions" (12), not abandonment, that creates through
visation the elevated spiritual moment described by Dean
vised jazz represents for Dean and Sal the epiphanal moment
of being that Kerouac was continually striving for in one w
other in both his writing and his life. The intuitive awarene
need for an order to shape improvisation that is evident
description of how "IT" is produced can be likened to Ost
portrayal of jazz improvisation as a form of bricolage that u
parate elements into a musical narrative.
Jack Kerouac's treatment of jazz in On the Road is consiste
what Christopher Miller calls Africanist discourse, the wa
Western culture has traditionally viewed Africa and, in
African Americans. Kerouac bases his argument for spont
"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" on his understanding of
provisation, but he misunderstands and simplifies the form
that distinguish jazz as a musical genre. Jazz does influenc
Road, but it is largely through Kerouac's Romantic identificat
the ideology of the African American jazz musician whose
visceral and who has been marginalized by white culture
havioral aspects of the music are also significant in the n
again Kerouac views them largely through the eyes of white
the communal nature of the music and the exchange betwee
MA L C OL M * 107
ence and performer he regards as further evidence

franticness rather than as characteristic of African American culture.
Finally, Kerouac discovers epiphanal moments in improvised jazz,

ironically, not because they are utterly free and abandoned but be-
cause their spontaneity is shaped by an underlying order. "[The]
work suffers-or is at least peculiar," as Edward Said has noted in
reference to a similar instance of appropriation, Verdi's treatment of
Egyptian culture in Aida, "because of the selectivity of and emphases
in what is included and, by implication, excluded" (122).
On the Road, as a narrative, shows an adherence to traditional lit-
erary form which is often at odds with the theoretical views es-
poused by Kerouac. The run-on sentence that ends the novel owes
more to the modernist notion of stream of consciousness developed
by writers like Joyce and Woolf than to jazz improvisation. While
jazz does not formally hold up as a thoroughgoing structural model
for the novel, it is important as an ideological, behavioral, and semi-
otic source for Kerouac's vision of America, even though his debt to
African American culture is not acknowledged. On the Road, then, is
a novel of contradictions. The Romantic ideology of primitivism
through which Kerouac views jazz prevents him from recognizing
the irony and self-reflection that is at the music's core. Moreover, the
Romanticism through which he views his own life and those of his
friends prevents him from achieving a postmodernist vision even
though many of his materials-the autobiographical nature of the
work and later the "Frisco: The Tape" section in Visions of Cody-
point in this direction. The achievement of On the Road, finally, is
that, like the early works of realism, it enlarges the scope of suitable
fictional subject material to include alcoholics, junkies, and jazz mu-
sicians and fashions a distinctive prose style to depict their lives.
Montague, Prince Edward Island
108 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R AT U R E
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"Jazz America": Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"

Author(s): Douglas Malcolm

"Jazz America": Jazz and Afri

n a 1995 review of Ann Charters's The Portab

Contemporary Literature XL, 1 0010-7484/99/0001-

ing other critics like Edward Foster and Bruce Cook,

(234). Ellison calls for "more serious critical

musical genre, which Frith, adapting Franco Fabbri's theory, terms

Although bop, the style of jazz that Kerouac trie

modifies and adapts, to his individual conception of jazz,

Even so-called free jazz, it is worth noting, is governed by rules that

will not be jazz or even music, for that matter

even more reliant on them than speech sin

Begin not from preconceived idea of what to s

Although Kerouac mentions sketching in "Essentials of Sponta-

in the sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breat

the chorus that limits his improvisation show

tion, whether of one or more choruses, is structured muc

duction to On the Road (xxx)-rather than contesting them. Interest-

ones like The Subterraneans and Visions of Cod

novative musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gille

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top

He begins this history by identifying the musicians in the novel's

Armstrong emerged, perhaps because unlik

apparent "madness," derives not so much fro

Partland and Eddie Condon-who embraced

Road several years after the novel's publication. Afte

For swing musicians, improvisation on "I Got Rhythm" mean

Bop musicians, like Parker and particularly Dexter Go

out as in" (88). At Sal's brother's house in Virginia, Dea

Kerouac is knowledgeable about certain aspects of bop and fre-

cover performance rituals in a widely defined sense. These are gestural

Aside from a number of unnamed ones in New York, Chicago, and

ing out that Kerouac seems to be conflating a later p

in which he attaches the three-syllable line "orooni"

4, Sal, who is sick in Mexico City, is deserted by

emulated those of the elites" (Highbrow 177). What evo

Although jazz and Sal have changed substantially by the end of

essentially rules of communication, how music works as rhetoric; such

It is noteworthy that the way Kerouac invests jazz music w

"he gets it-everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks

"IT" then appears to be some enigmatic aspect of the music that

cally structuring and realizing the music, the time of playin

ence and performer he regards as further evidence

Finally, Kerouac discovers epiphanal moments in improvised jazz,

Montague, Prince Edward Island

Baldwin, James. "The Black Boy Looks at the

.Kerouac: A Biography. 1973. New York: Warner, 1974.

Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner's, 1971.

Hillman, James. "Healing Fiction." Jungian Literary Criticism

Kerouac, Jack. Book of Blues. 1995. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Patterson, Lee. "Literary History." Critical Terms for Literary

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