AN EXAMINATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ AND BLUES IN JACK KEROUAC'S MEXICO CITY BLUES.

BY: RODERICK A. WARNER

CHAPTER ONE: JAZZ and BLUES:

In his brief introductory note to Mexico City Blues, Jack Kerouac stated that he 'wanted to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.' (MCB) In other words, Kerouac set out specifically to emulate textually the way jazz soloists improvise their solos. In a letter dated August 19, 1955, from Mexico, (1.) to Sterling Lord, he makes this even more explicit and, somewhat pompously perhaps - or presciently - equates his achievement on the same level as his experiments with prose:

'I hitchhiked through the awful South and Texas to get here, and am relaxing very high. In fact so high I wrote a big volume of poetry (150 poems) in past week MEXICO CITY BLUES which will do for poetry what my prose has done, eventually change it into a medium for Lingual Spontaneity... a kind of challenge Jazz Session for letters - (about time). These poems are of no gainful commercial significance right now, so I'll hold them...' (L, 510)

An interesting point here is the 'challenge' aspect of his work - he sees it as a gauntlet thrown down to orthodox 'letters,' presenting his poetry like a jazz musician in a cutting contest, where one soloist tries to outdo the other. (2.) One also notes the drug reference: 'relaxing very high.' Kerouac wrote most (if not all?) of Mexico City Blues on marijuana, interspersed with shots of morphine (administered as much for the intense pain that he was suffering for much of the time due to his recurring phlebitis as for the purposes of getting 'high'). (3.) But these poems are the work of an artist who is convinced that he has achieved some form of breakthrough, outrageously claiming that they 'will do for poetry what my prose has done'. This 'Lingual Spontaneity' or what I shall term a 'Bop Poetics' (4.) is the key to understanding much of the form and language - and sound - of Mexico City Blues. Kerouac can be regarded as a jazz musician manqué; certainly, his knowledge of the music was deep and extensive:

'Jack's preeminent [musical] interest was the revolution in the sound of jazz saxophone... The saxophone had begun to talk with a human voice, with the rhythms and phrasings of black speech... The bop saxophonist's flight along a variable-noted line had to stop only when he ran out of breath.' (MB, 125)

One can understand why Kerouac, whose 'preeminent [musical] interest was the revolution in the sound of jazz saxophone,' began to see the possibilities for a new poetics. The above quotation from Gerard Nicosia's biography of Kerouac connects speech and the sound of jazz: the saxophone's ability 'to talk with a human voice' and the movement of the soloist's line with its similarity to the movement of the voice expressed in terms of units of breath: 'the bop saxophonist's flight along a variable-noted line had to stop only when he ran out of breath.' The resultant 'bop poetics' had a deep parallel with Charles Olson's seminal poetic manifesto of the Fifties, Projective Verse (1950): 'Olson saw a breath and energy interaction creating the poetic line. The breath, like the word, is part of the body.' (MC, 44) In his 1968 interview with the Paris Review, Kerouac himself makes an explicit connection to jazz saxophonists (via a sideswipe at Olson):

'Jazz and bop, in the sense of a , say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made... [T]hat's how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind... I formulated the theory of breath as measure, in prose and verse, never mind what Olson, Charles Olson says, I formulated that theory in 1953 at the request of Burroughs and Ginsberg. Then there's the raciness and freedom and humour of jazz.' (5.)

In this passage, Kerouac compares the phrasing of the jazz saxophonist - the 'tenor man' - which is dictated by his breath control to his own poetic method. Further, the length of his 'sentences,' his poetry and prose lines, are seen as a direct translation of his mental movement: 'breath separations of the mind.' At first glance, this emphasis on mind seems at variance with Olson's theory, where mind and body are linked by the spontaneous physical process of breath. I would suggest, however, that in the translation of the 'breath separations of the mind,' via the physical process of writing, and the reader's reaction's to a line that, to achieve the poet's intentions, forces him/her to vocalise it, this difference need not be too exaggerated. Further, the end of the poem implies some return to the body, in its veering away from Buddhism. More importantly, Olson and Kerouac are linked by their individual attempts to break away from the over-formalised straitjacket of so much of the poetic establishment of the time.

Jazz, with its African-American ethos and outlaw status, is also being privileged as an influence that will help to produce - in theory at least - a more demotic, slangily vibrant and democratic poetry. Thus, 'the raciness and freedom and humour of jazz' will be important to his poetics, producing the wild, free-blowing quality of much of Mexico City Blues, its 'goofiness' and 'gonzo,' go-for-broke improvisations with no revisions and no turning back. An inclusive, sprawling poetry that deconstructs the accepted 'high art' model of what a poem should be,and to which, as Edward Halsey says:

'seemingly anything that fits the general drift of the rhythm, music and tone can be added, no matter how incongruous it may seem: the sound of a bus outside the building("Zarooomooo") [MCB, 73, 6], an idea for Buddhist lipstick ("NirvanaNo"), [MCB, 201,2] nonsense language ("I'm an Agloon") [MCB, 22]. (6.)

He was also an aficionado of the older forms of blues:

'Jack's conception of poetry was also affected by the content of traditional blues. Blues singers memorialised in song every place they went and everything they did... Since the blues reported how someone felt at a particular time, they could be happy as well as sad. For Jack, they served as a perfect vehicle to express - as the bop musician did in pure sound - his immediate ongoing response to the world.' (MB, 218)

One can see the influence and the attraction for him of these instrumental and vocal models - a 'perfect vehicle' - in Mexico City Blues. Using a basic form of chorus to loosely parallel the blues structure, he could freely roam at will through his imagination, reacting instantly to whatever was happening round him: 'his immediate ongoing response to the world,' and attempt to incorporate these sensations (translated into language) straight into the poem, while relying on several motifs and general themes to bring him back to the ground base, giving the work a textual coherence, albeit one that is often disguised. This jazz/blues structure, therefore, gives him freedom of poetic manoeuvre and a flexible form to anchor it in.

A jazz soloist, especially playing live, will react, not just to his musical accompaniment, but to the particular atmosphere of his surroundings, audience, etc. Kerouac emulates this improvisatory immediacy in Mexico City Blues, as a continuation of his earlier his poetic work:

'Mexico City Blues continued the "sensory meditations" Jack had tried in his San Francisco Blues poems the previous year. There he had followed the visual scene out the window of the skid-row hotel. Sitting on Bill Garver's bed at 212 Orizaba, Kerouac let his mind follow his friend's rambling monologue. His method wasn't literal transcriptions of what was actually being said. Rather, he made his poems out of what he heard, not necessarily what was said, and what he associated in memory with what he heard.' (CH, 199-200)

Bill Garver's (7.)'rambling monologue' works with and against Kerouac's writing, in a call-and response pattern (8.) that is similar to that which is endemic to all forms of African-American music, from traditional folk song, blues, work songs and gospel, right through the spectrum of r & b, rap, hip-hop and soul to the most extreme experiments in improvised jazz. He is free, therefore, either to react to, or ignore, Garver; as Charters says, he can construct 'his poems out of what he heard, not necessarily what was said.' In this sense he is often working with the overall sonic ambience of Garver's words, rather than specific conversational topics. The patterns of memory that the old man's words may have triggered indirectly are of equal importance, in this respect, especially with regard to the large sections of the poem that are concerned with his dead brother Gerard and his family: 'what he associated in memory with what he heard.'

I will examine the first three choruses of Mexico City Blues in an attempt to reveal what I have identified as a strong approximation of an underlying jazz/blues structure that Kerouac uses as a launching-pad for his improvisations and one that he will return to throughout:

'In the 1900s a three-line stanza, consisting of one line repeated and a third rhyming line, became widely standardized and is considered the most familiar blues form. It is performed over twelve bars in common time, though frequent liberties may be taken with stanza length, and usually follows the harmonic progression of tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords... [although] a number of variants are known.' (GR, 122)

A typical twelve bar blues would be the following chorus from Charlie Patton's Green River Blues:

'Some people say the Green River blues ain't bad Some people say the Green River blues ain't bad Then it must not have been the Green River Blues I had.' (9.)

Throughout the poem, individual pages of Kerouac's notebook form a separate chorus, imitating the 'twelve bars' of the individual blues chorus: '... if an idea (or riff) was not exhausted in that space, he would pick it up in the next poem.' (10.) In the first three choruses, one can identify a rough approximation to the orthodox blues 'three-line stanza.' But he was attempting to write within a 'bop poetics,' and bop was a new form of jazz that was more intensely chromatic and rhythmically complex than its antecedents. At the same time, however, one must bear in mind the continuing importance of blues in the new music: 'Bebop also re-established blues as the most important Afro-American form in Negro music by its astonishing contemporary restatement of the basic blues impulse.' (11.) Arguably, Kerouac's poem works in the same fashion, by sketching out a form, and then overlaying it with increasing complexity, while retaining the basic 'blues impulse.' Just as important, perhaps, is the bop approach to the shape of the melodic line:

''Bop musicians tended to cut their phrases irregularly against the form of the underlying tune, phrasing in odd lengths... instead of the more regular two- and four-bar segments of the basic tune and its harmonies. Jazz musicians had of course always phrased in irregular lengths... But the boppers employed irregular phrasing more frequently than earlier players had done.' (GR, 596)

Even a simple, almost downhome slow blues, such as Charlie Parker's famous recording of his composition 'Parker's Mood' (12.)starts with a classic blues riff from the folkloric memory banks, but by the second four bar section is being double timed and pried apart. By the third section, this is even more pronounced. Thus, even in the exposition of the theme, Parker is improvising - by the second chorus, he is running totally across the bar lines - an effect that Kerouac uses throughout Mexico City Blues, to follow his poetic thought in a surprisingly exact parallel with 'bop' players such as Parker. (Although one must remember that blues singers had never totally respected the form. From early players like Blind Lemon Jefferson to those like John Lee Hooker, whose career spans most of the century, (13.) individual players had often exercised the freedom to stretch their lines out as and when it suited them, taking 'frequent liberties with stanza length' - a technique which echoes Kerouac's words: 'Add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science.' (14.) In this sense, what might seem archaic and primitive in the older blues has a surprisingly contemporary resonance. The explosion of the New Wave in jazz in the late Fifties and early Sixties, which radically stretched and reshaped the forms of the music, can be seen as a revolution which, like the bebop of the Forties, was always rooted in the African-American experience as expressed by the blues. Kerouac often seems to anticipate this revolution in many parts of the poem with wild, spattering bursts of text, while using his basic blues structure as a loose form to ground his improvisations on.

The first chorus lays out some of the main themes and motifs of Mexico City Blues: Buddhism, the American landscape that he travelled so extensively, and Garver's 'found speech,' compressed into the dense bop/blues line of his poetry. No explicit reference to jazz occurs until chorus 11, '(musician stops,/brooding on bandstand),' (MCB, 11, 6-7) - yet the rhythm and form is established from the outset.

1st. CHORUS:

   Butte Magic of Ignorance
     Butte Magic
     Is the same as no-Butte
                      All one light
                      Old Rough Roads
                      One High Iron
                      Mainway

                 Denver is the same

     "The guy I was with his uncle was
      the governor of Wyoming"
         "Course he paid me back"
         Ten Days
             Two weeks
                Stock and Joint

     "Was an old crook anyway"

     The same voice on the same ship
     The Supreme Vehicle
                S.S. Excalibur
                Maynard
                Mainline
                Mountain
                Merudvhaga
                    Mersion of Missy 

   
2nd. CHORUS:
 
    Man is not worried in the middle 

    Man in the Middle
    Is not Worried
    He knows his Karma
    Is not buried

     But his Karma
     Unknown to him,
     May end - 

     Which is Nirvana


     Wild men
     who kill
     Have Karma
     Of ill

     Good men
     Who love
     Have Karmas
     Of dove

     Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
     Have come surreptitioning
     Through the tall grass
     To face the pool of clear frogs 
    
3rd. CHORUS:

     Describe fires in riverbottom
     sand, and the cooking;
     the cooking of hot dogs
     spitted in whittled sticks
     over flames of woodfire
     with grease dropping in smoke
     to brown and blacken
         the salty hotdogs,
         and the wine,
         and the work on the railroad.

     $275, 000, 000, 000.00 in debt
             says the Government
     Two hundred and seventy five billion
             dollars in debt
     Like Unending
             Heaven
     And Unnumbered Sentient Beings
                Who will be admitted - 
                Not-Numberable - 
            To the new Pair of Shoes
            Of White Guru Fleece
                       Ojo!
                 The Purple Paradise

(MCB, 1-3.)

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Mexico City Blues: Intro Chap 1 Chap 2 Chap 3 Chap 4 Conclusion