Cedar Bar Redux

It’s hard to find one single album that covers all of Dizzy. Ken Burns did it for us, thank God! There really are no words for Dizzy, you just have to hear for yourself. Best tracks are “Pickin the Cabbage,” “A Night in Tunisia,” “Manteca,” and “Birks Works.”

For me this is the best of Bird, all his best recordings on one album. Before iPods, I went through 5 copies. If you really listen you can hear his voice through his horn. The best tracks are “A Night in Tunisia,” “Loverman,” “Cool Blues,” and “Bird of Paradise.”

This book is basically Neal Cassady’s autobiography. After reading On the Road, you get an idea of what a crazy man Neal was. It’s a good thing he wrote about his life so we can understand why. This is the only book he ever published.

2007 marks the 50 year anniversary of this book! To me this is a good boy/bad boy story: Sal Paradise (good boy) and Dean Moriarty (bad boy). These guys have some crazy adventures that take them across the country. I can’t help but notice that when they aren’t together you get to see Sal’s heart. After all, Dean is only out for kicks, Sal even starts calling him “the Holy Goof.” Keep in mind that this book is a true story, names and places were changed. Sal is really Jack Kerouac and Dean is Neal Cassady.

Bebop was to the 40’s what Punk Rock was to the 70’s. Noisy and misunderstood. It’s all about the ability to improvise, and in the 1940’s that was kind of strange. Bebop is very complex music, here is my simple way of explaining it. Imagine a band playing your favorite song. Only each guy is kinda doing his own thing within the song. The drummer plays a little faster and there are a few more notes or even a whole extra line in the chorus. That my friends is Bebop! Sort of, it’s more than that. Let’s put it this way, the more you listen, the more you’ll hear.

The Beat Generation was a group of writers that came into being during the mid to late 40’s. The first few were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs. The Beats approach to writing was very different that what most of America was used to, and they struggled for years to get published. A great example of this is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He wrote it in 1951 and it wasn’t published until 1957. The Beats wrote about real life. What you see, touch, feel and do. I guess you could cheaply say they wrote about sex, drugs, and rock n roll in the 50’s. To me they are so much more.