All That Jazz

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Lindsay Gillies responds to Chris Stolz:
"chris stolz writes:
If there is a writer who has captured the structural intricacies and
freeforms of jazz (truly schizophrenic music) it would be Pynchon.
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agreed 110%.  there is a deep relationship between Pynchon's prose style and
bebop and its children,  . . . "

Don Larrson responds:
Well, yes, but . . .
Pynchon admits admiring Kerouac, the master of "sweet spontaneous bop
prosody" (if I remember Ginsberg's words correctly), but he doesn't stick
a roll of teletype paper in and go at it either.
...
On the other hand, his writing has a high degree of structure to it that has
affinities with Baroque and or Classicism.   [...] Like the bopsters,
though, he often employs structure only to undercut it at the same time.
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to which Lindsay sez:
as Will also points out, there is nothing "spontaneous" about bebop.  Alan 
G.'s zen-flavor compositional approach is very, very different, even if it 
ends up sounding similar.  Coltrane, we know, practiced endlessly and 
obsessively, and as opposed to classical composers needed to deploy many 
modalities beyond the major and minor.  Even the folk-inspired model 
experimentation of a Bartok doesn't come close.  Its the very densness and 
prefiguration of bebop and its offspring (particularly Coltrane) that I 
think compare to TRP's prose methods.  Both are fundamentally different as 
approachs from Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the beats, zen, buddhist, 
or otherwise.