In the same novel he also praises trumpeter Roy Eldridge (“vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety”), while in The Subterraneans he calls pianist Thelonious Monk, “the monk and saint of bop.”
Kerouac’s heroes were the musicians he heard in his twenties and thirties, including saxophone great Lester Young. In a lecture given by academic Sam Charters at The Jack Kerouac conference in Boulder, Colorado, in 1982, it was even claimed that Young was the man who gave Kerouac his first marijuana cigarette. There is a wonderful description of Young in On The Road, as “that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped.” In the same novel he also praises trumpeter Roy Eldridge (“vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety”), while in The Subterraneans he calls pianist Thelonious Monk, “the monk and saint of bop.”