Pretty clear that early bebop was beat, even though Dizzy was said by Anita O'Day to be straight and clean-living. It's a look I've always liked, without ever wanting to sport it, but beat style was massive amongst a small number of guys when I was eighteen. Chris Sullivan, I guess, had something to do with it. These guys had discovered punk early, grown tired of it early, begun switching to the plastic sandals we have heard a bit about on here, chains, goatees, slicked-back hair, Afro-Cuban music, Parker etc. etc. They were clubbers and hardcore with it, whereas I was staying home more, listening to Parker, The Velvet Underground, blues, Dylan and Van Morrison; followed by some Beiderbecke and Kenton (mainly for the tracks featuring Art Pepper). I remember one guy called Dean who had the goatee, mohair sweaters, jellies etc.
English caff style seems to me to be beat running into modernism: Art Nouveau or Art Deco fascia and tiling; a relaxed, tolerant, youthful attitude. McInnes, Norman, Kerouac, Penguin detective novels with green covers featuring Marlowe; the gaggia and Pepsi-Cola. And the music on the juke? You name it, Paul.
Love Dizzy, and I think it's a little bit unfair what Miles wrote about Louis and him...
and yes, RR&P is right about Beat style basically being a version of Dizzy's signature look: beret, goatee, dark glasses...
I think Diz was the first one to mix AfroCuban rhythms with jazz when he took the unprecedented step of inviting Cuban drum master Chano Pozo into his band. Even the other band members complained, until Chano wrote Manteca that is . . .
Diz also made some killer jazz funk in the 70s.
I'm sure beat style was one of the influences back in the day, and Diz's look was a part of that.
Love Diz's Latin stuff - "Chega De Saudade" anyone?
Last edited by Yuca (2010-08-04 12:57:43)
I'm not too familiar with Dizzy's later latin work-I'll have a listen.
He was clean living, made to look even cleaner against the hedonistically dirty Charlie Parker.
Love 'Night In Tunisia'-not that I am biased (much) but it was re-arranged by Denis de Blasio for Maynard Ferguson-really great full on big band.
....if you have a few minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIsh-nUoxM&feature=related
Not in any way 'bop', but blows my socks off every time. Kicking brass.
BM
A lovely little glimpse into a forgotten little sub-genre of style I remember so well from the seventies, Mister Panic. What I love about your writing is your ability to capture the mood and atmosphere with such obvious loving detail.
Great stuff...
That's a nice compliment and is much appreciated.
Dizzy has always been a great favourite with my Dad. I remember being on holiday in Scotland when I was a child and being puzzled by him referring to anyone with the surname 'Gillespie' as 'Dizzy'. That's a true story.
Jack was also into fucking twelve year old Mexican girls.
Cassady was a well documented snitch, always sucking up to the railroad foreman, turning in some brakeman for sleeping on the job. Nothing wrong with a work ethic, except Dean Moriarty was only faking it. As Sal Paradise was only faking the all American football college boy, he preferred getting screwed by Gore Vidal.
Towards the end, after the bar fight that left him most certainly brain damaged, as the change the in the writing of his letters show, Kerouac and his nephew beat up a black guy in a racist attack.
He hated the hippies, nothing wrong with that, he despised the commercialism of the beats. Too complex a scewed up bisexual who could only write with benzedrine and booze, late at night in marathon sessions and then his work was gibberish, nonsense, no longer be-bop prosody. He had already peaked by the time On The Road was published.
He had a strange mysogynistic relationship with women really, they are not eminate characters in the Dulouz Legend, just read The Subterraneans.
Back to Dizzy, his latin tinged stuff is much more appealing than Bird's. Of course, Bird had a go on Verve with Machito, but its not on par with Dizzy's explorations.
Funny how Miles never did any real AfroCuban stuff. Okay, he did some Spanish influenced material and a bossa-nova album, but never a latin album. He did most everything else.
Wasnt aware he was nailing vidal. just burroughs. and everyone was banging burroughs, he had the best dope stash. i dont find all of the later stuff all that bad. visions of gerard in particular is excellent. at the very end it did fall apart. theres a lot of evidence that he was on a passive suicide kick by then.
Why do you take every opportunity to run down beat culture and style 4F Hepcat?
What great writer's life wasn't a tragedy? beat or not? The Beat movement was (still is), more than just Kerouac et al. Of course, all style movements become stereotypes to the uninitiated. Just because they are parodied doesn't render them worthless.
Isn't Ivy one big stereotype?
Now, boys. I think he just couldn't settle to anything other than his writing. Too restless a spirit?
Hepcat does know his stuff, it's obvious. And I hope he doesn't think I'm being confrontational, because i'm not. But, it just seems he has a bit of a disregard for general Beat culture. Or it may be that he just doesn't like me and enjoys pushing the right buttons. Either way, that's his right to do so...
I'm not here to cause friction anymore, Mister Panic.
I probably intended to highlight 'beat culture' through visual imagery rather than the literary or personal lives of the participants. I certainly didn't mean to open up any cans of worms.
^^On the contrary Beatnik, I misrepresent myself: Kerouac and the Beats are the reason I dropped out of uni and went to work in a fabrication shop in Stone Manganese Marine in north Birkenhead. Not necessarily a good move and unlike Fred Voss, it didn't do my poetry any good; it did however, eventually lead to great adventure and my On The Road experiences.
I love the Beats and they opened the door, along with Paul Weller and I hate to say it, Sting, into the world of be-bop and jazz.
Please accept my apologies, because I dig the Beats and Kerouac. There's no other literary movement other than the Romantics and the WWI war poets that I have passion for.
You and I are probably as closely aligned as anyone on this forum.