A Beat to Everything

​by George Walker

​I’ve been doing Neal Cassady reading performances this year [2017], and the reason I’m able to do that is I know the rhythm. Neal listened to jazz from the time he was a teenager, so he had those rhythms in his head. His speech had those rhythms. He’d be talking and there’d be this syncopation, there’d be a beat to everything he was saying. He wouldn’t just be talking, talking, talking. It would be this and then this, and you’d get this sense of a rhythmic flow. He’d be moving to it, too. It was kinetic, and he was driving a car, and it was all rhythmic. There was a jazz beat behind all this stuff, because that was in his head.

​The reason I’m able to do this now is because I know those rhythms. I listened to that music. And listening to Neal and being around him so much, I could see that rhythm in what he was doing: that’s what made it effective.