The Good, the Bad, and the Beat

Blues and Haikus

By Martin Ballard

I can still see the album covers scattered on the sticky veneer dining table: Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, lit by a pale shaft of late afternoon sun that punched through the front parlor window. 

I spent that whole afternoon with the late poet Allen Ginsberg, who also played me Jack Kerouac’s album, Blues and Haikus. So here was Allen Ginsberg, patiently if bemusedly serving as my sherpa to the realms of creativity, Tibetan Buddhism, and the historic lineage of American counterculture. A a very jumpy 24-year-old journalist, I didn’t need ruby red clod hoppers and a hellhound named Toto on my trail to remind me I wasn’t in Kentucky anymore. 

As a journalist, I have met many historically significant people in my lifetime. All well and good, but mostly the article consisted of adding your fown brush strokes to a press kit. This became increasingly true as time wore on.

But back in 1984 (ahem) things were looser than they are now and people less guarded. I actually got to hang out with Ginsberg, who was campaigning hard to solidify the legacy of the literary movement of which he was a founding member. Bruce Cook may have been the first to point out that the Beats were defined not by forward-pushing drive but by an almost neurologically-rooted apathy toward the straight lines and round numbers of mid-century American conformity.

Mainstream critics took a dim view of the Beats, deriding them as ungrateful refuseniks who were looking the gift horse of American exceptionalism in the mouth. But the Beat view of the world was nothing if not life-embracing. It wasn’t until I read my friend’s book that I understood the idea of ‘Beat’ as a kind of deeply spiritual surrender and in no way cheerless.

Standing in the shadow of the new post-war America, a nation eager to cash in on its newfound hyper industrialization, and the riptide of corporate regimentation that went along with it. The Beats were done with it before they started. They were children of a spiritually exhausted mid-century America who despite a new era of unprecedented prosperity found that the promises of consumer culture were not only empty but toxic.

The seeds were there but when after many years I went back to those conversations, it is clear to me that it was Allen who showed me where to find the prima materia that I’m working with now: the blues as primordial North American  earth spirit, the steel-string guitar as a spiritual two-way radio we use to communicate with it and each other, and improvisation in vocal form or instrumental line channels spirit. 

The time I spent with Allen was an important part of my intellectual finishing and it was later buttressed and reinforced considerably by the late Bruce Cook, a deep-thinking author of fiction and non-fiction books, and a true mentor to me. I met Bruce Cook in 1986 when I first came to Los Angeles to work as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News. Bruce wrote the first serious biography of the Beats as a literary and cultural movement as well as superb work of popular journo-scholarship on the blues.

A defining member of the Beat literary movement, Ginsberg became an icon of the mid-century American counterculture. He wrote the poem culturally ground-breaking poem “Howl,” was a close comrade of novelist Jack Kerouac, an unabashedly out-of-the-closet gay man back when such forthrightness got people bashed in the head; and he was an early prototype of an emerging, important and enduring archetype: Jewish poet-intellectual as a needed guardian of the American conscience. 

We drank instant coffee and shared a fresh pack of Virginia Slims 100s that Allen had found on the sidewalk outside the small bungalow in Boulder he rented and shared with longtime companion Peter Orlovsky. An iconic old rotary phone – sleek as patent leather – sounded a wheezing bell. A blue jay in a pear tree outside the window muttered fragments of Rumi to the soft clacking of bamboo chimes in a sleepy autumn breeze. Allen finished a phone conversation and set the stylus onto side two of ‘Blues and Haikus’ on the old portable phonograph. 

I learned a lot that day that took me decades to understand. I think I finally have full command of what he was putting across to me. There’s a lot more I could say about that interview, but I just wanted to give enough of the story to speak for this domain’s authenticity. I am not a published poet and I have no idea how to write a haiku, but I feel all these years later that Allen was entrusting me with this phrase. It is evocative. To me, it conjures a sense of balance, regeneration and warmth. 

As I say, I think of these two things as the halves of an amulet. The existential problem of the blues is that you’re trapped in something that you need to transcend. Blues starts with the premise that one’s problems are too unique and monumental for anyone else’s comprehension, sympathy or ability to cure and proceeds to the conclusion that all problems are so discreet, unique, insufferable and incurable that we might as well stop wishing for it to be otherwise. 

In other words, it’s the first noble truth. And any suggestion of a resolution, hope, or optimism– other than one in which the singer reveals to be pitiable wishful thinking– destroys the song’s power. Allen made me understand the blues as a primordial force of karmic leveling. 

Haiku comes at things exactly from the opposite direction than the blues.  If Blues is the lotus thrusting from mud to sky, then Haiku transmutes mendacity into significance, gathering the diffusion of impressions into a single point of light that is laser-focused on the here and now. Haiku instructs us to stop pondering the distant horizon, that it is safe to let go of the cosmic detective story and hang out with the dragonflies. 

Blues and Haikus was American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac’s (1922-1969) second album and was released in 1959 by US label Hanover (co-founded by Bob Thiele and Steve Allen)….Blues and Haikus was made with tenor saxophonist, arranger and composer Al Cohn (1925-1988) and tenor/alto/soprano saxophonist John Haley “Zoot” Sims (1925-1985), who were both veterans and partners in clarinettist Woody Herman’s legendary Herd bands. The album was “possibly” recorded in 1958 and released in October 1959.

“Blues and Haikus is a stunning duet between speaker and saxmen, working spontaneously in this peculiar mix of jazz and voice, in which the saxmen do get their solo spots around Kerouac's work. There's much more of a sense on this album of a conscious interaction here between Kerouac and his accompanists.”

—Bruce Eder, AllMusic, 1961