Various Artists

In the fifties, with Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac was instrumental in starting the Beat movement. The acknowledged leader and spokesman of the group, it was he who first used the term Beat Generation to express despair over the suppressed state of the individual in society and belief in the natural world and in the powers of the beat of jazz music and poetry.

The Beats rejected the prevailing academic attitude to poetry and declared, through their art and attitudes, their alienation and disgust with shallow American middle-class values. Ginsbergs Howl, and William Burroughs Naked Lunch both became the focus of much publicised obscenity trials and Kerouac’s On The Road, became one of the most controversial and best selling American novels of the 20th century.

Jack Kerouac And Steve Allen -October In The Railroad Earth / Gil Mellé -The Gears / Mamie Van Doren -The Beat Generation / Ken Nordine -My Baby / Sun Ra And His Arkestra -Saturn / Lenny Bruce -Psychopathia Sexualis / Lambert Hendricks & Ross -Jackie / Slim Gaillard -Atomic Cocktail / Dizzy Gillespie -Salt Peanuts / Al Jazzbo Collins -The Discovery Of America / Thelonious Monk -Blue Monk / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -Dog / Kenneth Patchen With The Chamber Jazz Sextet-The Murder Of Two Men By A Young Kid Wearing Lemon Coloured Gloves / Jack Kerouac And Steve Allen -Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker -Scrapple From The Apple / Anita Ellis With David Amram -The Crazy Daisy (From The Film Pull My Daisy) / George Shearing -Conception Three Bips And A Bop Featuring Babs Gonzales -Lop-Pow / Ken Nordine -Bury-It-Yourself Time Capsules / Charles Mingus -Nostalgia In Times Square (From The Film Shadows) / Allen Ginsberg -America / Louis Armstrong -The Beat Generation (From The Film The Beat Generation) / Jack Kerouac -"Cockroach" (From The Film Pull My Daisy)