The Living Theater is reviving Jack Gelber’s groundbreaking 1959 play The Connection, a study of drug addicts (some of them jazz musicians) pontificating on their lives and chemical loves. The cast includes saxophonist Rene McLean, whose father Jackie performed in the original version, and will be directed once again by Judith Malina, who will also play the role of Sister Salvation.
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There seems to have been a bit of a Lord Buckley revival in recent years, which is a good thing. Buckley, by many accounts the original hipster comedian, had a storied career and is known best for his hip-speak riffs on Jesus, Shakespeare, the Gettysburg Address, Edgar Allen Poe, and other high-canonical texts.
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Multi-instrumentalist, jazz/classical/world maestro, and Beat Generation icon David Amram will be appearing at Farm Bloomington for a jazz-poetry performance this Friday evening, June 27 at 8 p.m. EST in Bloomington, Indiana. Amram, whose music has been featured in Night Lights programs such as Jazz and Jack Kerouac…
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Several months ago, around the time we launched this new site, I began to draft a post about a book that influenced me in my youth, as the saying goes. It was summer, I was 21 years old, and I was working in a restaurant by day and spending my nights drinking in a rather aimless manner, drifting along in a rather aimless relationship. I’d dropped out of college the year before. Bored and restless, a friend and I headed west to Seattle, planning to hitch-hike along the Alaskan Highway and land jobs in the…
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Indiana University Jacobs School of Music professor Phil Ford, heard recently on our Night Lights program Jazz and Jack Kerouac, will be giving a talk this Friday (Oct. 19) on private acetate recordings that Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, and Allen Ginsberg made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I’ve had occasion to hear a brief bit of one of the acetates, which featured Keroauc, Holmes, and Seymour Wise doing scat/bop vocalese accompaniment…
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All the talk last week about Jack Kerouac, as well as the name of an interesting new blog, sent me back to Who Walk in Darkness, a novel published in 1952 by Chandler Brossard. Brossard’s book is a study of downtown Manhattan hip circa 1948…albeit a study of a somewhat better-dressed, better-fed crowd than, say, the denizens who inhabit William Burroughs’ Junky…
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“Here were the children of the American bop night,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1957 novel On the Road, which, like many of Kerouac’s other writings, celebrated and invoked the music of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and many other jazz greats. We’ll mark this weekend’s 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s best-known book with a program that explores his relationship with jazz, including recordings he made with saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims…
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Hot on the heels of Jack Kerouac’s entry into the Library of America comes news that the “scroll” version of his most famous book is going to be published. I actually got to see some of the scroll–which is 120 feet long–several years ago…
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The Library of America to publish The Road Novels. First Philip K. Dick, now JK… can Burroughs be far behind? I’ve always had mixed feelings about Kerouac (though The Subterraneans held up…
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The Subterraneans, the only novel of Jack Kerouac’s to be adapted to film so far, was released in 1960, when the media fever surrounding the Beat Generation (much of it inspired by the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957) was still at a high pitch. Hollywood took great liberties with Kerouac’s story…
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