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Title: Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds by Clark Coolidge ISBN: 0-945953-09-7 Publisher: Living Batch Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00

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Average Customer Rating: 2.67 (3 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: Disappointment
Comment: This book starts with an outstanding idea: the influence of jazz on Kerouac and (perhaps) the influence of Kerouac on jazz. I was totally disappointed. Author is largely incoherent. The antithesis of Kerouac's clarity. Outstanding idea for another author/another attempt.

Rating: 4
Summary: Lyrical and Authoritative
Comment: Coolidge's notes on Kerouac are both personal (discovering On The Road as a student) and critical (with particular emphasis on Visions of Cody), but he focuses mainly on Kerouac's writing about jazz and on his prose as jazz, pulling some wonderful examples. The more general second half of the book--a miscellany of Coolidge's own lyrical and authoritative writings about jazz--is fun reading; I think his description of Joe Dodge's drum sounding "like a door slammed at the end of a long hall way" is as good as any of Kerouac's similar inspirations. Though he writes well about live jazz, the meandering long section, "Listener's Reach," culled from Coolidge's letters to David Meltzer, has some of the best writing I have encountered on the special pleasures and frustrations of listening to jazz records--their great or maddening acoustic eccentricities, the very personal meanings of repeated listenings. I'd call Now It's Jazz an enjoyable piece of Kerouac criticism and a notable addition to the short list of really good, imaginative books about jazz.

Rating: 3
Summary: collection of old not a new
Comment: This is a collection of older 'non-fiction' writings, not a new work of poetry. I already had most of the contents which I had copied from journals and such, but some like the complete review of Kerouac's letters and the read-through of Visions Of Cody were new discoveries for me. Worth getting, but not what I was hoping for.