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

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.

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.