---

01. San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation) - Jack Kerouac 02. Beat Generation - Bob McFadden 03. Footloose in Greenwich Village 04. Blues Montage - Leonard Feather 05. Manhattan Fable - Babs Gonzales 06. Reaching into In - Ken Nordine 07. Parker's Mood - King Pleasure 08. Route 66 Theme - Nelson Riddle 09. Diamonds on My Windshield - Tom Waits 10. Naked Lunch [Excerpt] - William S. Burroughs 11. Bernie's Tune - Lee Konitz 12. Like Rumpelstiltskin - Don Morrow 13. Oop-Pop-A-Da - Dizzy Gillespie & His Orchestra 14. Basic Hip - John Brent 15. Christopher Columbus Digs the Jive - John Barrymore 16. Clown - Charles Mingus 17. Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves - Chamber Jazz Sextet

01. Hip Gahn - Lord Buckley 02. Twisted - Jon Hendricks 03. Yip Roc Heresy - Slim Gaillard & His Middle Europeans 04. Ha! - Charlie Ventura 05. Pull My Daisy - David Amram 06. October in the Railroad Earth - Steve Allen 07. Cool Rebellion - Howard Smith 08. Cosmic Rays - Charlie Parker 09. Kookie's Mad Pad - Edd Byrnes 10. Bebopper - Gordons 11. Hunger Is From - Ken Nordine 12. No Pictures, Please - Rod McKuen 13. Like Young - Mitchell Ayres 14. Married Blues - Kenneth Rexroth 15. Psychopathia Sezualis - Lenny Bruce

01. Jack and Neal / California, Here I Come - Tom Waits 02. Readings from "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody" - Steve Allen 03. Interview With Jack Kerouac - Ben Hecht 04. Kerouazy - Don Morrow 05. Cool - John Brent 06. But I Was Cool - Oscar Brown, Jr. 07. Uncool - John Brent 08. High School Drag - Phillipa Fallon 09. Oop-Bop SH-Bam - Kenny Clarke & His 52nd Street Boys 10. Professor Bop - Babs Gonzales 11. Beatnik's Wish - Patsy Raye & The Beatniks 12. Like Having Fun - Elmer Bernstein 13. On Beatniks - Carl Sandburg 14. Swinghouse - Gerry Mulligan 15. Greenwich Village Poets - Charles Kuralt 16. America - Allen Ginsberg

A three-CD box set featuring recordings from titans including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Rexroth, The Beat Generation works in tandem with Rhino's earlier compilation The Jack Kerouac Collection to paint a definitive audio portrait of one of the seminal literary uprisings of the 20th century. Because the Beats were so heavily influenced by jazz, their work ranks among the most rhythmic and lyrical in all of literature and lends itself perfectly to spoken word recordings; Kerouac's insistence that Beat stood for "beatific" aside, the name's musical implications are undeniable, with the writers' free-flowing, improvisational wordplay -- what Ginsberg dubbed "spontaneous bop prosody" -- echoing the radical innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The set also charts the Beats' own influence on musicians spanning from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross to Perry Como to Tom Waits, at the same time embracing kindred spirits including Ken Nordine, Lord Buckley, and Lenny Bruce; the inclusion of some of the material is questionable at best -- the box would probably work as effectively at two discs instead of three -- but in recapturing the singular spirit of its time, The Beat Generation is an essential document of cool.

---