Beat Square & Cool II - The Prequel..!
12 years ago Beat Square & Cool - MOOCHIN02 was released to critical acclaim... a collection of classic beat generation film scores, which broke the mould, not just the ground breaking films, but the cult film scores - some released for the first time on Moochin' About...
but before them, came artists who paved the way, in their own Hep-cat, hipster & beatnik style...

This literary movement built itself around underground jazz culture, which expressed liberation of body and soul. Inspired by jazzmen and hep cats, the Beat Generation hipsters rejected traditional values, embraced African-American musics, travelling, drugs, a free sex lifestyle as well as spirituality. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and On the Road author Jack Kerouac launched the radical American counterculture that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving a tremendous mark on lifestyles, and on the world of arts and opinions — hippies and punks alike... here is a collection featuring the original mavericks...

BSC vol 1 original notes
Out of the twilight murk of post-war film noir emerged a new strand of shadowy cinematic concepts. This time though the films were more sexually provocative, fraught with existential angst and fizzing with outsider rebellion towards the Eisenhower mainstream of 1950’s America. The beginnings of a generation in motion, with bebop to crank the starting handle. Like the Beat Generation, bebop was young, hip, cool and underground. Not only did it fire up writers such as Jack Kerouac and Jack Gelber, but key directors too such as John Cassavetes and Don Siegel and the music chased the narrative like cat and mouse. These eight cult movies and their enthralling soundtracks presented here are crystalline windows into a lost world. Flashbacks to a more innocent age when young people first realized they did not have to live by the codes and conceits of their parent’s world. War was over, but the generational wars were only just beginning. And writers like Kerouac were in the vanguard, bringing Beat and bebop together in a head-snapping rush of hope and excitement. None more so than these lines from his essay, Jazz Of The Beat Generation: ‘We seek to find new phrases; we try hard, we writhe and twist and blow; every now and then a clear harmonic cry gives new suggestions of a tune, a thought, that will someday be the only tune and thought in the world and which will raise men’s souls to joy. We find it, we lose it, we wrestle for it, we find it again, we laugh, we moan. Go moan for man. It’s the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream’. A dream, it has to be said, that’s far from over.

Beat Square & Cool reviews...

“Hipsters and lounge lizards are in for a treat with this 5CD treasure chest that brings together 8 crucial outsider films of the late 50’s & 60’s”
JAZZWISE MAGAZINE ***** (5 STARS)

“If anything, this second five-disc-plus book(a generous 60 pages) set of classic jazz on film, far surpasses its excellent predecessor devoted to film noir”
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE ALBUM OF THE MONTH ***** (5 STARS)