In his spoken Verve recordings, Kerouac paid lavish tributes to some of the jazz artists who had influenced him, including vibes star Lionel Hampton.
In his spoken Verve recordings, Kerouac paid lavish tributes to some of the jazz artists who had influenced him, including vibes star Lionel Hampton. Kerouac celebrated Hampton’s single “Hey Ba Ba Re Bop,” hailing the way the outlandish performer would “jump into the audience” while “the whole theatre rocked.” Kerouac, who was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, also extolled the “Buddha-like” saxophonist Charlie Parker, praising him for bringing to his music “the feeling of early in the morning, like a hermit’s joy, the perfect cry of a wild gang at a jam session.” Kerouac said he believed that Parker was “musically as important as Beethoven but not regarded as so.”