Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds

by Clark Coolidge

Music. Cultural Writing. Perhaps no living American poet has taken Kerouac, jazz and bop prosody into as many original directions as Clark Coolidge. In his inimitable prose, Coolidge recalls and explores the role Kerouac (Part 1) and jazz (Part 2) have played in his artistic development. A book of tremendous energy from the very first sentence: ON THE ROAD was first handed to me by somebody in a dorm at Brown, my sophomore year, 1957-58. 'Here, read this.' CRYSTAL TEXT, BOOK OF DURING, MESH and AT EGYPT are among the titles by Clark Coolidge available from SPD.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Music, Literary Criticism

136 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1999

About the author

Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Often associated with the Language School his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies, Coolidge often finds correspondence in his work. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

Reviews

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds, Clark Coolidge produces some of the best writing on Kerouac and jazz music. It parallels the writing of Nathaniel Mackey, Amiri Baraka, and Fred Moten. And (as far as I know!) unlike the others mentioned, Coolidge comes with the knowledge of someone deeply immersed in the playing of jazz, he is no mere appreciator and deep listener - he lives and breathes jazz, it’s in his head, his hands, his way of life. Better yet, he’s a drummer! I have this feeling with Baraka that much of his work comes through as attempting to imitate Trane’s blistering sax solos in the form of poetry, whereas Coolidge’s poetics is the kind that Max Roach plays, or as I hear Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, Han Bennink. But still, the best comparison I can think of is Cecil Taylor, and Cecil practically is a drummer as we all know! Coolidge’s writing on Kerouac draws out exactly what he takes from Kerouac and employs in his poetics. It’s the same within the jazz writing - all of the problems and sounds he is working through in these excerpted letters and short reviews all seem to relate exactly to his brand of geologic free jazz poetics.

Now interestingly enough, I’d call his poetics a kind of geologic free jazz, going between his two main interests that Coolidge has come to time and time again within his poetry. Geology and jazz, yet within these writings his taste isn’t exactly “out there.” He is primarily a lover of bebop and it’s various forms. His love of free jazz seems to stop at the greats, Trane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor. He sees, in some of the sections on jazz, to see free jazz as dying out and failing in some sort of way. However, none of this is to say his taste is conservative, he is no Wyston Marsalis. And nowadays he has performed free jazz and free improv with the likes of Thurston Moore, perhaps he’s opened up to wider realms of sound and its many manifestations within free jazz / free improv. Which leads me to yet another comparison - Derek Bailey. Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey are the two artists I’d compare sonically to Coolidge’s brand of poetics. Interestingly enough too Beckett is Bailey’s favourite much like Coolidge too. The way Derek Bailey breaks down jazz guitar to almost in a sense phonemic and syllabic sounds are, in my eyes, extremely similar to the ways Coolidge broke down language and went inside looking to rebuild it into new forms of expression no longer limited by any kinds of rules. Coolidge has said in interview that: “A lot of my early work was trying to revive the energy in the language by going back and taking it apart. I was sometimes misapprehended as trying to destroy the language… I wanted to take it apart, look at it, try to revive it for myself and then try to build it back up.” This strikes me as being within a similar modality to what Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey are both doing in terms of jazz piano and guitar. It’s not trying to destroy music, destroy sound, rather to take it apart and revive a new energy within the sounds to create new modes and spaces of sound, new rhythms, new textures, not limited by the old modes of sound. They both develop their own intricate syntax of sound just as Coolidge develops a new form of geologic jazz driven syntax in his poetics. Even more so Coolidge’s poetics is similar to Taylor’s own poetry, albeit both differ in content but the form is there. It’s the same rhythmic kind of language.

I will say, prior to reading this I had only really thought bad of Kerouac. Granted - I had only heard stuff secondhand, I’ve never really read him outside of excerpts. Yes this is not very scholarly or critical of me to just accept secondhand information without actually reading him. But Coolidge’s deep love of all things Kerouac have sort’ve turned that around. I want to give him a chance, everything he writes with deep love and appreciation of Kerouac has such a beautiful touch of a kind of apprenticeship as I’d say. Coolidge is very adamant that he became a writer through reading Kerouac and the possibilities he discovered in spontaneous prose. And again, without knowing it prior it does seem almost strange - Coolidge’s abstract brand of free jazz against Kerouac’s more bebop prose that follows Bird and Lee Konitz. But that also made me realise perhaps I’m forcing more of my own jazz interests, free jazz and modern creative, into my thoughts about Coolidge and his poetics. Coolidge does prove overall that he’s more driven by bebop than anything else. Besides his deep love for Kerouac, this is rivalled by his deep love for Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. He doesn’t really write much about Monk here to be fair - but one of the best essays, “Sonny’s Well” combines Coolidge’s poetic style into a prose remembrance of a Rollins concert that reads almost exactly like Mackey’s prose in “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.”

I’ve read somewhere that John Ashbery says when a poet or artist in general writes about another artist, they are typically talking about themselves through this other artist. Typically what they latch onto in another artist is truly an aspect of their own work, veiled through the work of the other artist they are writing about. And everything Coolidge writes about Kerouac cld almost easily apply to himself. He really shines in “Kerouac: A Talk” and “A First Reading of On the Road and Later.” And in the jazz writings on “Music is Memory” it seems Coolidge is (while not saying this is at all a “skeleton key” to his work) writing about his own process of work and writing, what he took from Kerouac and his jazz training to create his poetics. He does at one point even talk about Bernadette Mayer and their idea surrounding the “Everything Work.” Coolidge describes this as “it’s the incredible ideal that you could get so practiced in this kind of improvisational quickness of mind and word-dropping-into-the-slot that every single thing could be included” (56). This comes with Coolidge’s idea of using all of language, as said in interview: “I thought: why can’t I use all of the language? Not limit myself.” The idea of using all of the English language and the Everything Work seems in direct correspondence to what Coolidge learned from Kerouac. Even more so, Coolidge outlining the premises behind spontaneous prose, of Sketching, Memory Blowing, and the BabbleFlow easily directly relates to his own process of improvisation in poetry. When one considers his work in The Crystal Text, At Egypt, Polaroid, it is this exact process of Sketching, Memory Blowing, and the BabbleFlow at work in Coolidge’s own method and key. Of course, unlike Kerouac, Coolidge is actually a jazz musician, so he is even more “inside” jazz so to say than Kerouac. Kerouac is more of an appreciator than someone who has the knowledge Coolidge does of jazz. Plus, I find Kerouac too (what I’ve read in the excerpts!) is attempting to be more of a sax player in his prose, he is trying to play Bird and Konitz in his writing. Whereas again, I see Coolidge on an entirely different beat. My mind in drums again goes to Rashied Ali, in my eyes one of the most rhythmic and driving drummers ever. The same motion is there in Coolidge’s poetry.

Which is another great aspect of Coolidge’s writing - he is genuinely knowledgeable about jazz music in a way that isn’t just appreciation. He knows the ins and outs of this music, he has played it all his life. His essays are full of beautiful poetic language but they also have genuine analysis of the music that isn’t just this sounds good this doesn’t. He can write about the music as someone who knows exactly what the sounds are and how to write about them. It is a shame that, like Ashbery, Coolidge hasn’t written more critical essays like these. As he says “I don’t think of myself as essay writer / reviewer and only have produced such-like if pushed hard enough. Otherwise, and best?, it all goes into the work (the poems, the musics), where it originated anyway and lives eternally” (10). Ashbery is similar in that while producing a lot of art criticism, most of his actual critical thought and “essays” have gone into the work of poetry. Which is great and far better to have the works of art but Coolidge here proves himself to be such an incredible writer on jazz music and other writers! I’m glad we have at least this collection. As another reviewer states, it’s amazing how as compared to his poetry, Coolidge comes across as really clear in these essays. He doesn’t try to be snobby or pretentious about his love of Kerouac and jazz - it really feels like these essays were personal love letters to the sounds that formed Clark Coolidge. And I think with his deep knowledge of jazz, Coolidge is one of the best to have this love for Kerouac - he hears all of his sounds and rhythms, he can be the drummer to Kerouac’s sax. Cheesy? Sure, but I can only imagine that Coolidge drums along while reading Kerouac!

[Also I love Coolidge’s equation of lines in jazz music being sort of equivalent to lines in poetry. I think there is a lot there to be written about.]

[Jedediah Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I did my master's thesis on Buddhism in Kerouac's writing, I read a lot of criticism on his work, far more than I'd ever care to again. But Coolidge's informal essays actually make for some of the best analysis I've ever read. As a poet and musician -- an explorer of sound on both counts -- Coolidge has a sympathetic ear for Kerouac that most academics are missing. May I say, without summoning up yet another dreadful pun about 'the beat goes on,' that as a drummer, Coolidge is able to speak insightfully about rhythms and beats in Kerouac's sentences.

Kerouac's writing gets coverage in the first half of the book while the second covers jazz with occasional references to Kerouac and others writers. I would have preferred to see Coolidge's lengthy cento/collage based on Visions of Cody that has thus far only appeared in an obscure little magazine, but I would not be surprised if the estate of JK blocked that. Regardless, the jazz section is what the author wanted to share and it makes a fine companion to the first. Neither section is really for neophytes; familiarity with the subject matter is necessary since these are really personal essays, not generalized introductions. But for readers who know Kerouac, following Coolidge along his pathway of discovering his own intellectual and emotional responses to sounds found in the word will be a revelation to the reader as well.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A winning run of occasional love letters to the 'Kerouac sound' and the musics it grew out of. Coolidge is an astonishing poet who's infused the time forms of jazz into his writing for decades. He's also a seasoned drummer with an encyclopedic knowledge of all that swings. But Now It's Jazz never once made me feel like a square, or like Coolidge holds the key to some esoteric kingdom you'll never enter without him. I was a little surprised by his tastes, which balance somewhere around the mid-Fifties bop he discovered in his teens. But that's part of the book's charm: nice and easy, not (here anyway) trying to push things forward, just a warm meditation on the sounds he's loved.

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The jazz is in the syntax.