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Yesterday, today and tomorrow mark the 40th anniversary of the New York recording sessions that produced Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. The album was released in April 1970.

I really shouldn’t say much more about the record. But I still think it’s a miraculous piece of work. I found a copy in a friend’s dad’s LP collection as a teenager (the vinyl had hardly been played) and made a tape of it which I thrashed to death.

I took the tape on a school trip to the USA, and have distinct memories of playing it on a long bus trip across the high desert of Arizona. Kerouac’s Visions of Cody was in my bag, and the redness of the desert stretched out like the surface of that other planet Miles and his crew were trying to reach with this music.

As I’ve written before, it was heady times for a teenager. I’d like to think I haven’t completely lost that particularly notion of existence that formed in the apex of those three forces meeting: Wayne Shorter’s solo on Spanish Key, the vastness of the American continent with signs pointing to Albuquerque and Kerouac’s love poem to the vanished idea of a friend.

“At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.”

-Jack Kerouac

YouTube is a trove of little gems, many of which would not be otherwise available to most of us. Here are a few videos related to Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac’s books were the first I read as a teenager that demonstrated an entirely new way of writing and describing the world. In quick sucession I read On the Road of course, Dharma Bums, and the weighty Visions of Cody, which I started on a long bus trip across the Arizona desert in 1996. (I recall that Miles’ Bitches Brew was on near-permanent loop on my walkman – heady times for a 17 year old).

The first video is one of the few extant films of Kerouac reading his own work, on the Steve Allen Show in 1959:

And although Kerouac was one of the writers who most deeply revolutionised the use of written English in the mid-20th Century, he was in fact francophone by birth. Born to immigrant Québecois parents in Massachusetts, he didn’t learn English until he went to school.  Here he is interviewed on Canadian TV in the mid-1960s, speaking the thick joual dialect of his childhood:

A documentary that seems worth seeing is the 1999 film The Source, recounting the origins and development of the Beat movement in the 1940s and 1950s, and the lives of Kerouac and his contemporaries such as Allan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. This extract is set to music by British composer Mike Westbrook.