Jazz audiences are always On the Road

One ingredient of Jack Kerouac's On the Road remains noisily vivid - jazz

Kerouac was trying to capture the sounds of 40s jazz in the rhythms of his book. Photograph: Corbis

For some reason, my holiday reading includes Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The only roads I've traversed in the past week, however, have been in a rented Citroen Picasso, enjoying air-conditioned drives across French vineyards interrupted only by the occasional upscale barn conversion or lazily amiable small town. So it's safe to say it can't have much to do with emulating Kerouac's 1947 trip into a drunken, mind-jangling post-war American vortex in an assortment of jalopies, the occasional racy Buick convertible, hobo-packed boxcars, huffing Greyhound buses and dementedly driven farm trucks.

I hadn't read On the Road since I was a student (and 10 years younger than the 29-year-old Kerouac who wrote the novel in three weeks flat), so I suppose I was curious to find out if this breathless, one-damn (but-damn-fascinating) thing-after-another book had kept the magic ingredient that led Bob Dylan to say "it changed my life, like it changed everyone else's". It didn't seem to have done, because the zig-zagging race toward the next horizon, the next girl, the next doss-house, the next meaning-of-life conversation, the next dollar, or the next meal had come to feel like being stuck in a revolving door in a way it hadn't when I read it first.

But one ingredient has remained noisily vivid.


Kerouac often made it clear that the sound of jazz in the 1940s had a lot to do with the kind of tone, intensity and unpremeditated drive he was trying to capture in the rhythms of his book. And there are plenty of references to it in On the Road. In Los Angeles, Kerouac describes "the wild humming night of Central Avenue - the night of Hamp's (that's swing-band leader Lionel Hampton's) 'Central Avenue Breakdown' - howled and boomed ... they were singing in the halls, singing from their windows, just hell and be damned and look out."

Or, one night in San Francisco, this episode: "Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar, and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spreadeagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast - Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink and wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes, somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn, and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air.

Dean (that's Kerouac's alias for his crazed, elusive road partner Neal Cassady) was directly in front of him, with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man's keys, and the man noticed, and laughed in his horn a long, quivering, crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct."

OK, it sounds like the 1950s and pretty innocent, not the all-knowing 2000s. And it's a pre-rock era when jazz was still the pop music, even if the improvisational impulses in passages like that one, show that pop was still flexible and emotional enough to allow the wildest departures from the hook that the crowd could still hang on to, and want to.

But I could hear the free-improv English saxophonist Evan Parker, or the post-bop American master Dave Liebman in that description - and many more. Because the playing of such fearless individuals still embodies the spirit of On the Road - an uncalculating confidence in free-fall, an optimism about what unimaginable thing might be around the next corner, an indifference to what fashions or arbitrary marketplace rules might demand. Places where you hear that kind of thing today have smaller, and quieter, audiences - but ones that are just as open to the music's often raw emotional state. Jazz audiences are always on the road, in a way. And because it's an impulse that can't be quelled, neither they nor the spirit of the music will ever go away.