Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard
One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music From Kerouac’s Big Sur (Atlantic)Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur registers among the reluctant Beat standard-bearer’s most brutally aware works, seeking to escape the aftermath of iconification and confronting the destruction created by his alcoholism and isolation. Yet even Kerouac’s darkest howls and most yearning reflections are often dissolved by the breathless rapture of his prose, which is what makes Farrar and Gibbard’s score for the new Big Sur documentary so surprisingly and devastatingly beautiful. Rather than adapting Kerouac’s writing into the usual frantic jazz inflections, Farrar lifts lines into rootsy blues and Americana shades, surfacing the author’s uniquely skewed and stunning phrases. Farrar’s aching moans on “Low Life Kingdom,” “Breathe Our Iodine,” and “Big Sur” balance with Gibbard’s smoother, optimistic turns of “California Zephyr” and “These Roads Don’t Move” in reflection of Kerouac’s extreme nature, while “Final Horrors” and “San Francisco” beckon Townes Van Zandt. Reaching beyond mere transcription, Farrar and Gibbard hold Kerouac’s words at their evocative essence. (Farrar & Gibbard beat Antone’s Jan. 27.)
This article appears in December 25 • 2009.