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.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
Coolidge studies the music of Jack Kerouac's writing.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lyrical and Authoritative,
By J. A. Lee (New Mexico, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds (Paperback)
Coolidge's notes on Kerouac are both personal (discovering On The Road as a student) and critical (with particular emphasis on Visions of Cody), but he focuses mainly on Kerouac's writing about jazz and on his prose as jazz, pulling some wonderful examples. The more general second half of the book--a miscellany of Coolidge's own lyrical and authoritative writings about jazz--is fun reading; I think his description of Joe Dodge's drum sounding "like a door slammed at the end of a long hall way" is as good as any of Kerouac's similar inspirations. Though he writes well about live jazz, the meandering long section, "Listener's Reach," culled from Coolidge's letters to David Meltzer, has some of the best writing I have encountered on the special pleasures and frustrations of listening to jazz records--their great or maddening acoustic eccentricities, the very personal meanings of repeated listenings. I'd call Now It's Jazz an enjoyable piece of Kerouac criticism and a notable addition to the short list of really good, imaginative books about jazz.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nice 'N' Easy,
This review is from: Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds (Paperback)
This book is terrific for what it is: a run of occasional loveletters to the 'Kerouac sound' and the musics it grew out of. Consider how pretentious and insidey this book could have been: Coolidge is an astounding 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. More often than not he steps aside from his own experience to let the music and the language he uses to describe it do the talking (the special way he writes about jazz in spatial terms reveals a lot about his own work). Most of these pieces sound spontaneous, like Coolidge wants to enact in the writing the speed and alertness he loves so much in Kerouac or Rollins. I was a little surprised by his tastes in jazz, which balance somewhere in the mid-Fifties bop he first discovered as a kid. Thought he'd be more "out there." But that's part of the book's charm: Nice and Easy, not (here) trying to push things forward, just looking back warmly on the sounds he's loved.
3.0 out of 5 stars
collection of old not a new,
By Eddie Watkins (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds (Paperback)
This is a collection of older 'non-fiction' writings, not a new work of poetry. I already had most of the contents which I had copied from journals and such, but some like the complete review of Kerouac's letters and the read-through of Visions Of Cody were new discoveries for me. Worth getting, but not what I was hoping for.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
