Beat Poetry Project

At the »Beat Poetry Project«, music and texts are interconnected and interwoven with each other far beyond the production of conventional jazz and lyrics: Reiner Ziegler, Pirmin Ullrich, Roman Rothen, Matthias Klittich and Harald Schwiers present a musical and literary program with sounds and texts that changed the world at the end of the 1940_^s and beginning of the 1950_^s.

Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Allen Ginsberg are some of the well-known names of the movement. The »Beat Generation« attracted worldwide attention with Jack Kerouac’s novel, »On the Road«. The spiritual sons of that original Beat Generation left behind a legacy that is still alive on today’s music scene: Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders.

The thematic connection of music and text is the focus of the »Beat Poetry Project«. The spokesperson, Harald Schwiers, is an integral part of the band which has developed a series of compositions especially for this program. There are also havens of peace, dedicated wholly to the music of the era or prose texts – including the central chapter from Kerouac’s »On the Road«, »God has arrived«.

Music and texts symbolise a maelstrom in the bloodstreams of the spirit, motorways and everyday hustle and bustle, meditation and contemplation, hecticness and wistful searching for new values – jazz players and poets are becoming the priests of a new era. Everyone hungers for experiences. Fast and hard living in the knowledge of its consequences are a part of this. The sense of life of that time is fundamental to the understanding of current developments, for the self-image of the United States, which has been unchanged for 70 years, and the change of music scene through rock‘n’roll to punk and rap. The deep scratches in the »American Legend« are already clear in the work of the Beat Generation.