What made Jack Kerouac run?
Jazz helped In his great and weird book, “Mexico City Blues,” Jack Kerouac zooms in on Charlie Parker for three of the poetry volume’s 242 choruses. “How sweet a story it is/When you hear Charley [sic] Parker/tell it …” he sings. And well he might, for Kerouac had a lifelong love of jazz and he came of age at a crucial time in the music’s history. Because he was born in 1922 and lived until 1969, he was able to slice across the diversity of the jazz idiom with the assured opinions of a genuine fan who’d found a taste for traditional New Orleans jazz, big-band jazz, experimental jazz, be-bop, cool jazz and the West Coast influences that have all run together into the different estuaries that have brought us to where we now find ourselves as jazz fans. And that influence found its way into his prose, his poetry and his very method of thinking. Through him, the notion was tempered and hammered by contemporaries into a quite extraordinary body of work that has affected many notions of mu
