Although Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the best-known Beat Generation writers who were exhilarated by jazz, plenty of others were creatively fired by the music.“I’m the bop writer!” boasts a character in The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac’s 1958 semi-autobiographical novella set in the jazz districts of New York. The book, along with On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958), captured what the writer called “the new bop generation way of speaking,” and all three owed much of their inspiration to the author’s love of the improvisational jazz pioneers of that era. On the Road was a genuine...