Welcome to Nick’s Wednesday (evening) Coffeehouse! Tonight we feature the music of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, who was perhaps the finest musician who ever wailed an alto sax. Charlie is introduced by the spokesperson of the Beat generation: Jack Kerouac.
So, be hip and dig the wailing ax of Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker
Jack Kerouac: Remembering Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker: Now’s the Times
Charlie Parker: The Bird
Charlie Parker: Just Friends
Charlie Parker: Lover Man
All the audios at Nick’s Coffeehouse come from my own collection.
The Beat Generation was born out of post-war disillusionment and restlessness. They were a generation of young people struggling to come to terms with the chaos and uncertainties that were a part of their upbringing. Their movement, if it can accurately be called that, manifested itself in literature and poetry, which threw off the traditional, classical format to become a character in and of itself. The Beats attempted to express themselves in a way that was extremely personal and extremely in-your-face. They addressed issues that were taboo at the time, most notably homosexuality and drug use, writing largely for and to each other, sharing life experiences and crying out against an establishment that harbored little space for individuality and protest. ~ Amanda Erickson, The Beat Generation
Before the so-called folk music renaissance found folks sitting in coffee houses and listening to old and new folk songs, there were the Beats. I’ve blogged about the Beat Generation several times because I am enamored with certain aspects of it, such as their pacific response to the absurdities of life.
The coffee house experience of the Beats primarily centered around writers reading their own poetry or prose, occasionally accompanied by music from a single bongo drum to a jazz band. Jazz and bebop were the music of the Beats and one will find numerous references and even allegories regarding especially jazz in Beat writings. For example, listen to improvisers Del Close and John Brent attempting to explain Hip, the supposed language of the Beats:
Basic Hip ~ Del Close and John Brent
Moving on and into the Coffee House, one often found quite a scene (a word that also had a unique hip meaning). Jack Kerouac describes a gathering of beats for a poetry reading in a San Farancisco hipster club. (A note about Kerouac’s writing: most of it was autobiolgraphical—Jack wrote about what he experienced. In the selection below, the fictional names Jack has given his characters are followed [ ] by their real names)
The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbook [Allen Ginsberg], or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay [Michael McClure] (in a suit), or outof-this-world genteel-looking Renaissance Italians like Francis DaPavia [Philip Lamantia] (who looks like a young priest), or bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Rheinhold Cacoethes [Kenneth Rexroth], or big fat bespectacled quiet booboos like Warren Coughlin [Philip Whalen]. And all the other hopeful poets were standing around, in various costumes, worn-at-the-sleeves corduroy jackets, scuffly shoes, books sticking out of their pockets. ~ Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
Besides the reading of poetry and prose, as I wrote above, there was also music. Therefore, let us begin this visit to the Coffee House with jazz singer Carmen McRaesinging Coffee Time, a song that perhaps should begin every visit to a coffee house:
Coffee Time ~ Carmen McRae
Moving on, allow me to introduce two of the most famous Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, and poet Allen Ginsberg.
This afternoon I visited Coffee Messiah’s blog and was thrown back about fifty or so years as I listened to Shel Silverstein’s beat poetry.
I suspect that most of the folks who read this blog were born well after the days of the Beatniks, the Beats, or the Beat generation the media sometimes called them. There heyday was the post World War II days from the late 1940s through the 1950s and a bit into the 1960s. Some folks consider the Beats the predecessors of the hippies; I don’t. There may have been some chronological overlap and some shared beliefs, but I believe the Beat generation was unique.
I was too young to be a Beatnik, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t impressed and influenced by them. They called themselves “beat” (originally meaning “weary,” but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific” spirituality, and other meanings) and were derisively called beatniks, who expressed their alienation from conventional, (square) society by adopting an almost uniform style of seedy dress, manners, and hip vocabulary that they took from jazz musicians. They, unlike the Hippies, were apolitical and indifferent to social problems. The Beats advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism.
Beat poets sought to liberate poetry from stuffiness and bring it “back to the streets.” They read their poetry, sometimes to the accompaniment of progressive jazz, in coffee shops and bookstores. Although I was too young to be one of them, I rather consider myself an heir of the Beats. So I’m giving you—old beatnik or not—the opportunity to listen to the “voice” of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, doing his stream of consciousness thing with a work entitled Bowery Blues. with Steve Allen playing background jazz on the piano.
