Cedar Bar Redux

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.