After enough of them, though, readers will want to hear some of this music, with its power to bring the cops “swarming from the nearest precinct,” for themselves. “In Los Angeles, Kerouac describes ‘the wild humming night of Central Avenue – the night of Hamp’s (that’s swing-band leader Lionel Hampton’s) ‘Central Avenue Breakdown’ – howled and boomed … they were singing in the halls, singing from their windows, just hell and be damned and look out.'”Īn evocative passage, to be sure, and one drawn from just one of many jazz-infused sections of the novel.
“Kerouac often made it clear that the sound of jazz in the 1940s had a lot to do with the kind of tone, intensity and unpremeditated drive he was trying to capture in the rhythms of his book,” writes the Guardian‘s John Fordham. “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image,” he wrote, spontaneously, in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” He also insisted on “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).”īut actual music, and especially jazz music, also forms an integral part of the background - or rather, an integral part of the ever-shifting backgrounds - of the story of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s automotive criscrossing of America. When readers talk about the “music” of On the Road, they usually mean the distinctive qualities of its prose, all typed out by Jack Kerouac, so literary legend has it, on a three-week writing bender in April of 1951.
0 kommentar(er)
