"Jazz America": Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

In a 1995 review of Ann Charters's The Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956, Ann Douglas comments that Jack Kerouac's work "represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation" (2). While Kerouac's poetics, articulated in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," have literary antecedents--he admired writers as different as William Carlos Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and William S. Burroughs--his literary experimentation was also modeled on his understanding of jazz improvisation. A number of Kerouac's biographers and critics, of course, have recognized this source; however, while their views differ on the value of the influence of jazz on Kerouac's work, they share the assumption that a direct transposition of theory and practice from music to literature can be accomplished in the fashion that Kerouac proposes. The purpose of this study is to examine Kerouac's poetics and his best known work, On the Road, which was initially typed on a roll of paper in one "250-foot single paragraph" (Weinreich 41), in the light of the various generic rules that distinguish jazz from other types of music. While jazz does play a significant role in the novel, its impact lies in the music's ideological, behavioral, and semiotic implications--in particular their roots in African American culture--rather than in the direct application of its formal rules.

Critical treatment of the jazz influence on Kerouac's prose and poetry has tended to explicate Kerouac's goals rather than to ask fundamental generic questions about what constitutes jazz and whether it might reasonably serve as a literary model. Mike Janssen, following other critics like Edward Foster and Bruce Cook, notes that the Beats "used the principal ideas of bebop playing and applied it [sic] to prose and poetry writing, creating a style sometimes called `bop prosody'" (2). Robert Hipkiss is not entirely sanguine about the effect of jazz on the Beats' work: "The jazz idiom with which Kerouac and the Beats operated is ... in great measure responsible for his uninspired blowing as well as the occasionally ecstatic outbursts of poetic statement" (93). Malcolm Cowley, who persuaded Viking to publish On the Road, observes that the poems in Mexico City Blues demonstrate that "Kerouac's analogy with jazz is exact. Some of the choruses read like scat singing played back at slow speed, words `blown' for their musical values or their primary link to the subject matter" (qtd. in Gifford 190). Gerald Nicosia reports that Kerouac's Book of Blues is "one of the most important poetic works in the second half of the twentieth century" and further can be regarded as "one of the best literary equivalents of musical blues" (412). In her discussion of On the Road, Regina Weinreich, who along with Tim Hunt examines the jazz influence on the novel in some detail, argues that Kerouac's "notion of improvisation informs the language of [his] writing at an exact technical level. Though Kerouac had neither the knowledge of a musician nor the critical vocabulary of a person learned in the subject of music, he clearly demonstrates a profound identification of the creation of music with that of literary works" (8-9).

What is striking about this commentary is how little formal terminology is employed by either the critics or Kerouac. Hipkiss, for example, notes that in articulating his poetics Kerouac "inevitably uses the vocabulary of jazz to illustrate what he is trying to do" (79). Yet in the passage from "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" that follows, the so-called jazz vocabulary is colloquial and vague, as Kerouac exhorts his fellow writers to "blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement" (qtd. in Hipkiss 79). In his piece on Charlie Christian in Shadow and Act, a collection of essays from the 1950s and early 1960s, Ralph Ellison argues that jazz is much more than just musical technique and is, in fact, integral to African American culture, wherein each musician's improvisation "represents ... a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition" (234). Ellison calls for "more serious critical intelligence" to be brought to the subject (240), and subsequent studies, like Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones's) Blues People, Ben Sidran's Black Talk, Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues, and Craig Hansen Werner's Playing the Changes, have built upon his central observation. In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Simon Frith follows the same tradition and offers a cultural theory of musical genre that can help explain Kerouac's use of jazz in On the Road because it codifies the concept of genre to embrace elements outside of the strictly formal. Frith argues that music can be regarded "as a coded expression of the social aims and values of the people to whom it appeals" (62). The cultural 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 simulation 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 instruments 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 harmonies" (Understanding Jazz 40). Composed works that have a jazz flavor, such as George Gershwin's Rhadsody in Blue, are not jazz because 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).

Although bop, the style of jazz that Kerouac tried to emulate, is different from swing, which preceded it, the two styles are nonetheless founded in a very similar concept of improvisation that is based on what in jazz is referred to as the chorus: "What musicians meant by the term chorus was simply that segment of a solo which used the entire thirty-two measure AABA chord progression or entire twelve measure blues progression. A soloist might take only a chorus or perhaps take ten to twenty choruses" (Gridley 41). "Chord progression" refers to the harmonic structure that underlies a melody; for instance, the traditional twelve-bar blues typically involves harmonic movement from a tonic chord, C major, say, to chords based on the fourth and fifth scale degrees of C major. The composed melody is written in notes derived from these chords and is usually played at the beginning and ending, the head and tail as they are known in jazz, of a performance. Between the head and the tail, the musician improvises on the tune's chord progression: "The chord progression to the tune is usually retained with exactness throughout the selection, even during the improvised solos, simply by repeating the entire progression ... over and over" (Coker 9).

In Understanding Jazz, Ostransky points out that the jazz solo may appear to be spontaneous but requires a high degree of skill and training. The improviser follows the chord progression of the notated melody and

 
   modifies and adapts, to his individual conception of jazz, melodic 
   fragments, rhythmic patterns, and even entire phrases he has heard and 
   admired. All these memories and impressions are assimilated and transformed 
   into music that is fresh, and often, when it is coupled with the spirit of 
   spontaneity, music that is new. The performer's task is to organize his 
   material--however spontaneous his performance may seem--in such a way as to 
   make it appear that the material is, in truth, his own. 
 
      (60)