Allen Ginsberg

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sets his offbeat and often off-color writing to equally offbeat jazz and scores a bull's eye. The combination of words and music brings his work to life, and the results can be absolutely remarkable (as on "Complaint of the Skeleton…" and "The End").

Beat pioneer Allen Ginsberg has long explored the relationship between poetry and music,
recording albums of William Blake's songs and the single "Birdbrain" with a New Wave band
called the Gluons. Now Ginsberg has teamed up with an impressive collection of musicians
and composers – including Arto Lindsay, Bill Frisell, G.E. Smith and Rob Wasserman – and
set sixteen of his poems (seventeen on CD) to music. Produced by Hal Willner, w... More >