The Blue Note

The fifties were the time where the image was everything. The time where the search for perfection was an obsession. A time of a society afraid of the new and conformed with the conventional.  

Throughout the 50s, a group of people tired of the old manners expressed themselves in most varied forms. It was the fifties counterculture. It was “The Beat Generation”!

The “Beats” choose mainly the arts to speak out for what they considered to be an awful society. In the arts they were writers, painters, sculptors… And they had a thing in common: the love for the jazz and the blues. We can actually say that it was the sound of The Beat Generation.

It was in the 50s that great jazz musicians appeared. The trumpeter Miles Davis, the pianists John Coltrane and Bill Evans, the saxophone player Stan Getz, the drummer Art Blakey and so on. The “beats” found in jazz and in its players the ultimate point of reference to creation. A lot about jazz was said in the “beats’ ” writing. The jazz music was seen just like the things that came out from the beat generation’s people: “Something new and crazy” and in this case “done by black people.”

Besides this, the main common characteristics common to these types of art was the word beat. "The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted". Kerouac went on to twist the meaning of the term "beat" to serve his own purposes, explaining that it meant "beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz".

A lot of the beat generation authors wrote about jazz and its musiciams. To know more about the jazz and the beats go to http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/Jazz.html.

Thanks for read.