Kerouac said that his ambition in Mexico City Blues was to capture how jazz sounded.
Kerouac said that his ambition in Mexico City Blues was to capture how jazz sounded. “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday,” he said. One of his most poetic descriptions was about the saxophonist Lee Konitz, who he said played “April in Paris” “as if the tune was the room he lived in and he was going out at midnight with his coat on.” Konitz inspired Kerouac’s early writings, especially 1951’s Visions of Cody. That particular piece of hero worship had a strange twist, incidentally, because it was not reciprocated. In the anthology Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, Dr. Marian Jago, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music and Jazz Studies at Edinburgh University, who is also a saxophonist who studied with Konitz, revealed that the late jazz star professed “little interest” in the Beat writers. Konitz even reportedly described Kerouac and his ilk as somewhat “inauthentic.”