This page includes articles about our book and about authors and books discussed in this website along with excerpts from the book. Keep checking back.

Interested in other works by the authors? Click here to read a short story by John Cohassey.

Click here for a complete listing of articles written by John Cohassey.

Click here to read how RoyKotynek was introduced to the "Beats" just before the Christmas of 1959.

Click here to read John Cohassey's article in Metrotimes "Kerouac in Detroit."

Click here to read John Cohassey's article in Metrotimes "Hemingway's Last 'Good Country' (Northern Michigan as He Knew It)."

Co-author John Cohassey is used as a source for biographies throughout the internet. Click one of the below links to look up articles that use him as a source:

encyclopedia.com - Read his articles on John Coltrane and Eddie Harris
answers.com - Read his articles on Art Tatum, Max Roach and Horace Silver
enotes.com - Read his articles on Charlie Parker, Hank Jones, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones, Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, Yusef Lateef

-The Rebel Call-

1. "Offbeat on Campus"
2. "Bohemianism in Vietnam?"
3. "Elvin Jones' Detroit Years"
4. "My Friend Art Blakey: Recollection of a Jazz Fan From Detroit
5. Hemingway's Michigan

Offbeat on Campus
By John Cohassey

In Dharma Bums (1958) Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical character Ray Smith condemns colleges as “nothing more than grooming schools for the middle class non-identity.” No longer exclusively upper-class places of higher learning, post-World War II universities provided interaction between creative people and became battlegrounds for youth protest and countercultural activity. As sixties activist Jerry Rubin observed, the university was “a fortress” besieged by a drug-using hippie contingent “who were using state-owned university property as a playground.” Yet there were students who engaged in serious campus cultural activities at a time when the arts--not just popular music--were central to their experience.

Bohemianism in Vietnam? :
Excerpts from an American Musician Blogger
By Tim Brockett

There is a neo-Bohemianism which is developing in Vietnam, which I suspect is a continuation of the Bohemianism ethic the Vietnamese encountered during the country’s extended period as a French colony. The booming economy is beginning to create the wealth which inevitably begets leisure, and leisure goes hand in hand with having the time for creative pursuits. And this Bohemianism has for its current backdrop a setting akin to the world in which the American twentieth century avant-garde found itself, a world of imposed will and repression, a.k.a. the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Click here to read rest of article

Elvin Jones' Detroit Years
By John Cohassey

reprinted with permission
Oakland University Journal
Number 14 Winter 2008

Nearly a decade ago, a drummer friend of mine attended a Detroit music clinic and confessed to jazz great Elvin Jones: "Everything I learned to play on the drums I stole from you." Jones smiled and assured him: "You didn't steal anything. It's a gift." This gesture was indicative of Jones' willingness to share his art, a musical gift made unique through an uncompromising spirit that refused to "comply," said Jones, "to the standard form." Best known as the drummer with saxophonist John Coltrane's group (1960-1966), Jones had, before his death on May 18, 2004, awed audiences worldwide with his sheer musical power and improvisational brilliance. Throughout his life Jones credited his early Detroit years as preparing him for New York City's competitive jazz scene and for shaping his skills as one of jazz music's most innovative drummers.

Click here to read rest of article

My Friend Art Blakey :
Recollections of a Jazz Fan from Detroit
By Jerry "Tiger" Pearson
as told to John Cohassey

I had the privilege of meeting Art Blakey backstage at the 1984 Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival. At this open air concert on a bright August day, I will never forget how Blakey’s band--trumpeter Terence Blanchard, alto saxophonist Donald Harrison,tenor saxophonist Jean Toussaint, pianist Mulgrew Miller, and bassist Lonnie Plaxico---took the stage on the Pontchatrain Hotel’s patio, wearing dark sunglasses and custom-cut gray suits. In the audience was Blakey’s longtime Detroit friend, Jerry “Tiger” Pearson, former Golden Gloves boxer and a man fervently devoted to jazz. Nearly twenty years after Blakey’s performance, I met Tiger while he was dee-jaying his jazz program in a downtown Pontiac bar. In our subsequent and lengthy conversations, Tiger provided a wealth of information that resulted in the following. This is Tiger’s story--his memories of some of the greatest musicians of modern jazz.

Click here to read rest of article

 

Hemingway's Michigan
By John Cohassey

Before Ernest Hemingway became obsessed with bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep sea fishing, Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay region inspired his youthful imagination. In the woods beyond the family cottage and the opulent resort hotels, he eyed the wildlife, gun in hand, and cast his line in crystal clear streams and lakes, often making friends among the Algonquian-speaking Ottawa and Ojibwa, who lived in the shadow of a lumbering-era past. Snaphots of life, in pictures or words, do not tell an entire story. Hemingway once told his brother Leicester that he had “written a number of stories about Michigan country and that country was always true, but what happens in the stories was fiction.” Creatively driven by the principle that what is left out of a story is equally important as that which is included, Hemingway’s Michigan-inspired works are inventive stories which, just behind their surface, reveal familiar faces and names; trails and hills; lakes and streams. Thus much can be understood by looking at the region and its people—Hemingway’s scenes of youth when his family joined the thousands of “resorters” visiting the Charlevoix-Petoskey region.

Click here to read rest of article