Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgoff (2017)

That the lifestyle of (mostly) African American jazz artists, unusual creativity and strange hours somehow went together for some decades, is a well-known fact. That drugs, sometimes already outlawed, also played an important role here is another part of the legend of many a jazzman’s biography.

Author Martin Torgoff, probably best known for his drug and music infused work Can’t Find My Way Home, created a narrative that deals with the musicians, the drugs, the hipsters, the Beats and many others who shared that particular lifestyle, Weltanschauung and attitude. A few times this attitude has already been committed to paper in tales, novels and biographies by the real historical characters and in both style and content contained many remarks and allusions to the different drugs that were consumed at varying decades. According to Torgoff „[Bop Apocalypse] … is largely the story of the evolution of jazz and its relationship to the Beats: the first time that drug use coalesced with music and literature, becoming a central element in the creation of an avant-garde American voice and underground cultural sensibility.“

However, what may disappoint some readers, is that in Bop Apocalypse, we do not find any new information, nor new perspectives or new unpublished sections of the many primary sources the author quotes from. Hence the somewhat irritating label “narrative” for this book that in his words“… encompasses the birth of jazz in New Orleans, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Louis Armstrong, The Chicago of the 1920s, Mezz Mezzrow … the Savoy Ballroom, … the birth of swing, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, … bebop, … the conjoining of principal Beat Generation character, Jack Kerouac, …heroin, … the creation of three jazz-imbued masterworks (On the Road, Howl and Naked Lunch) … and the advent, by 1960, of a new bohemian culture in cities and on college campuses across America.“
It is also a political book as it asks the question whether there are any good reasons in outlawing certain drugs. Those readers who merely want “the facts” (or the stories) and feel perfectly comfortable to draw their own conclusions, should maybe refer to the original texts Torgoff cites and enlarges on. For his narrative almost entirely refers to other pieces of literature, narratives, stories and novels, and basically reenacts the environment of their genesis, while giving the reader some background information. For academic scholarship and research (on jazz, jazz culture, drugs and underground literary production in the 20th Century) this title may not be ideal.

On the other hand, for newcomers to the topics, this is a good overview that can be instrumental in presenting the literary forerunners and the countercultural masterminds that strongly informed American popular culture.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2017

Martin Torgoff. Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs. Da Capo Press, 2017, 448 p.