MEXICO CITY BLUES

A precious relic of the Beat Era is dusted off for moderns. Reacting to the smug complacence of the 1950’s and influenced by postwar European existentialists and Asian mystics, the Beat Poets assaulted middle-class America with their jazz-based iconoclasm. This Kerouac title, meditative and uncategorizable, exemplifies the movement’s sensibilities and literature. Graham Parker’s cockney jars in his otherwise spirited recording, backed up beautifully by David Amran’s music. A friend and fellow poet of Kerouac, Ginsberg should have given us a more idiomatic and resonant interpretation. But he doesn’t. He stumbles his way through MEXICO CITY BLUES as if reading it for the first time. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 97]