[Dixielandjazz] Modern art and jazz

[Charlie Hooks]

on 5/29/03 5:42 PM, Burt  Wilson at futurecon at earthlink.net wrote:

Charlie wrote: Hey, Rob?  Don't we dixielanders have troubles enough without
saddling us with a guy who liked Ginsberg enough to publish him?

That's a howl, Charlie.

Burt

By the way, the wife of my good friend Sam Charters, Anne Charters, the
noted ragtime pianist, is Jack Keroac's biographer and both she and Sam have
commented on TV about the relationship of Keroac's writing to jazz. There's
something to that.


   Can't remember all that much of the late fifties, but was it Keroac or
some enemy of Keroac who claimed to have learned to play tenor standing on
one foot so he could kick in the teeth of the idiot standing in front of the
stage and yelling, "Go, man, go!"?

   You're quite right about Keroac's own insistence that his writing was
connected to jazz.   Me? I've always wondered whether he knew one damn thing
about it--whether maybe he himself was the guy yelling, "Go, man, go!"   But
then, I really know nothing of his personal life outside his writing--don't
know whether his prose IS his life, as most people assume, a perpetual
autobiography, or merely a story by a good liar: William Faulkner said in a
Life Magazine interview once, defining a novelist, "A novelist is a man
congenitally unable to tell the truth--and that's why they call what he
writes 'fiction'." 

   Yeah, old Bill: he got right at it and never took himself too seriously.
;-)

thanks for the note,
Charlie