Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for Redemption

Abstract

Jack Kerouac once mused that Bob Kaufman's life was "written on mirrors with smoke" (Clay n.p.). While much of that smoke emanated from Kaufman's own mouth, his biography has also been somewhat haphazardly pieced together from various legends, hearsay, fading memories and book jacket blurbs. One need only trace the relatively spare (but growing) literary critical treatment of Kaufman and how his accounts of his ancestry have changed to recognize how tenuous the Bob Kaufman narrative is. 1 There has been a burgeoning critical attention to Kaufman in recent years coinciding with the reevaluative projects surrounding the Beat Generation, Black Arts Movement and the African-American left.